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THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES. 

VOLUME LIV. 



THE 


INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES. 


Each book complete in One Volume, 12mo, and bound in Cloth. 


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nomena of Glaciers. By J. Tyndall, LL. D., F. R. S. With 25 
Illustrations. $1.50. 

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Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political 
Society. By Walter Bagehot. $1.50. 

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Illustrations. $1.75. 

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ander Bain, LL. D. With 4 Illustrations. $1.50. 

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University. With 31 Illustrations. $2.00. 

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M. A., LL. D., F. R. S. With 14 Illustrations. $1.50. 

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J. B. Pettigrew, M. D., F. R. S., etc. With 130 Illustrations. $1.75. 

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ley, M. D. $1.50. 

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motion. By Professor E. J. Marey. With 117 Illustrations. $1.75. 

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AND SCIENCE. By J. W. Draper, M. D., LL. D. $1.75. 

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fessor Oscar Schmidt (Strasburg University). With 26 Illustra- 
tions. $1.50. 

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By Dr. Hermann Vogel (Polytechnic Academy of Berlin). Trans- 
lation thoroughly revised. With 100 Illustrations. $2.00. 


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3 


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$ 2 . 00 . 

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search on Primitive Nervous Systems. By 'George J. Romanes. 
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late William Kingdon* Clifford. $1.50. 

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London Hospital, etc. With 51 Illustrations. $1.75. 

52. ANTHROPOID APES. By Robert Hartmann, Professor in the 

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TIMES. By Oscar Schmidt. $1.50. 


New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 6 Bond Street. 



THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 


BY 

HUTCHESON MACAULAY POSNETT 

a 

M. A., LL. D., F. L. S. 

BARRISTER- AT-L AW ; PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND 

AUTHOR OF “ THE HISTORICAL METHOD,” ETC. 


RECEIVED. ?■ 

frp/OJL 7~r 

4{|RAgl 

NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET 

1886 









1161 08 avw 

J©JBU«4£ 


PREFACE. 


To assume a position on the border-lands of Science and 
Literature is perhaps to provoke the hostility of both the 
great parties into which our modern thinkers and educa- 
tionists may be divided. The men of Literature may 
declare that we have Mien into the hands of the Philis- 
tines, and that the mere attempt to explain literary deve- 
lopment by scientific principles is worthy of none but a 
Philistine. The men of Science may be inclined to 
underrate the value of a study which the unveiled pre- 
sence of that mysterious element, imagination, makes 
apparently less definite than their own. In a word, our 
position may arouse hostility and fail to secure friend- 
ship. What, then, is our apology for assuming it ? 

To our friends, the men of Science, we would say that 
the culture of imagination is of the utmost service alike 
in the discovery of new truths and in the diffusion of 
truths already known ; that the supposed hostility of 
Science to Literature, by discrediting this faculty, tends 
to lower our attainments alike in Science and Literature ; 
and that the study on which we now propose to enter 


VI 


PREFACE. 


affords a splendid field for the exercise at once of analysis 
and of imagination. 

To our friends, the men of Literature, we would say 
that nothing has contributed more largely to lower the 
value of their studies in the eyes of thinking men than 
the old-fashioned worship of imagination, not merely as 
containing an element of mystery, but as altogether 
superior to conditions of space and time ; that, under the 
auspices of this irrational worship, the study of Literature 
tends to become a blind idolatry of the Unknown, with a 
priesthood of textual pedants who would sacrifice to 
verbalism the very deity they affect to worship; but 
that the comparative study of Literature not only opens 
an immense field of fruitful .labour but tends to foster 
creative imagination. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold in his Discourses in America has 
recently discussed this supposed conflict between Science 
and Literature ; and, though his treatment of the defi- 
nition of Literature — a subject to which we shall pre- 
sently refer — is by no means satisfactory, few will refuse 
to join with him in the hope that Literature may some 
day be “ studied more rationally ” * than it is at present. 
To such rational study this volume is intended as a 
contribution, however slight — an effort, it may be feeble, 
to treat Literature as something of higher import to man 
than elegant dilettantism or, what is possibly worse, 
pedantry devoted to the worship of words. 

Should the present application of historical science to 
Literature meet with general approval, the establishment 
* Discourses in America , p. 13G. 


PREFACE. 


vii 

of chairs in Comparative Literature at the leading Uni- 
versities of Great Britain, America, and the Australian 
Colonies would do much to secure the steady progress 
of this vast study, which must depend on the co-operation 
of many scholars. The harvest truly is plenteous ; but 
the labourers, as yet, are few. 

The translations which this volume contains are, for 
the most part, the author’s workmanship. Many illus- 
trations, however, which he had placed in his manuscript 
have been left out from want of space, even an entire 
chapter, on the development of Greek prose, having been 
omitted for the same reason. These illustrations may be 
added on some future occasion, or published in another 
volume. Meanwhile, indulgent readers will kindly attri- 
bute any apparent dearth of evidence to this want of 
space. 

Should errors of print or matter have escaped the 
author’s notice, he would also beg his readers to remem- 
ber that this work was passing through the press just 
as he was on the eve of leaving this country for New 
Zealand. 

24, Trinity College, Dublin, 

January 14, 18SG. 



CONTENTS 


BOOK I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Wiiat is Literature? ... ... ... ... ... 3 

II. Relativity of Litekatuke... ... ... ... 21 

III. The Principle of Literary Growth ... ... ... 57 

IV. The Comparative Method and Literature... ... 73 

BOOK II. 

CLAN LITERATURE. 

I. The Clan Group ... ... ... ... ... 89 

II. Early Choral Song ... ... ... ... 99 

III. Personal Clan Poetry ... ... ... ... 130 

IV. The Clan and Nature ... ... ... ... 1G2 

BOOK III. 

THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 

L The City Commonwealth Group ... ... ... 171 

II. Clan Survivals in the City Commonwealth ... 177 

III. Toetry of the City Commonwealth ... ... ... 198 


\ 


X 


CONTENTS, 


BOOK IV. 

WOR LD-LITER AT UR E. 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. What is World-Literature ? ... ... ... ... 235 

II. The Individual Spirit in World-Literature ... 242 

III. The Social Spirit in World-Literature ... ... 2G9 

IV. Would-Literature in India and China ... ... 288 


BOOK V. 

NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


I. 

What is National Literature? 

... 

... 339 

II. 

Man in National Literature 

... 

347 

in. 

Nature in National Literature 

... 

... 374 

Conclusion ... ... ... 


390 


Index 


393 


BOOK I. 


INTRODUCTION. 
































































































































































































































































































































































































CHAPTER I. 

WHAT IS LITERATURE ? 

§ 1. Charles Lamb in one of Lis essays speaks of “ books 
which are no books ” as a catalogue including calendars 
and directories, scientific treatises and the statutes at 
large, the works of Hume and Gibbon, the histories of 
Flavius Josephus (“that learned Jew”), Paley’s Moral 
Philosophy, almanacks, and draught-boards bound and 
lettered on the back. It moved the spleen of Elia “ to 
see these things in boohs 1 clothing perched upon shelves, 
like false saints, usurpers of true shrines — to reach down 
a well-bound semblance of a volume and to come bolt on 
a withering Population Essay — to expect a Steele or a 
Farquhar and find Adam Smith.” But, humorous and 
capricious as it is, this catalogue gives us a glimpse of 
problems which since the days of Elia have gradually 
assumed defined shape and serious significance : — How 
shall we distinguish the various classes of writing which 
social evolution produces ; how shall we separate spe- 
cialized scientific studies from the works of creative imagi- 
nation — the latter apparently Elia’s ideal “ books ; ” 


4 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


what, in fact, as distinct from scientific treatises and all 
other “ things in books\clothing,” is “ literature ” ? 

The unfortunate word has indeed been sadly abused. 
In popular usage it has come to resemble an old bag 
stuffed out and burst in a hundred places by all kinds of 
contents, so that we hardly know whether it could not be 
made to hold anything “ written,” from to-day’s news- 
paper or the latest law reports, to Assyrian inscriptions, 
the picture-writings of the Aztecs, or the hieroglyphics of 
Egypt. Even professed scholars have contributed little 
towards the prevention of this cruelty to words. For 
example, Sismondi, one of the pioneers of literary history, 
though starting in his Litterature du Midi de V Europe 
(1813) with the suggestive promise that he intended 
“ above all to illustrate the reciprocal influence of the 
peoples* history, political and religious, on their literature, 
and of their literature on their character,” vitiates from 
the outset any scientific treatment of his subject by 
leaving its nature unexplained. It is the same with 
Hallam. Shirking any effort to define the meaning of 
“ literature,” or even indicate the necessary difficulties in 
any such definition, Hallam uses the word (as he tells 
us in the preface to his Literature of Europe) “ in the 
most general sense for the knowledge imparted through 
books ; ” and so treats it as a common, and apparently 
useless, label for a perfect farrago of subjects — logic, 
astronomy, the drama, philology, political economy, 
jurisprudence, theology, medicine. Even immense im- 
provements in the extent and depth of historical studies 
have done little to redeem the use of the word “ litera- 
ture,” the origin of languages having for the most part 
diverted attention from that of the forms of writing as 
dependent on social evolution. Hence, such excellent 
scholars as J. J. Ampere, Littre, Villemain, Patin, Sainte- 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


5 


Beauve, Taine, in France; G. G. Gervinus, Koberstein, 
Hettner, Scherer, and the authors pf “ culture-histories ” — 
Grim, Riehl, Kremer, and others — in Germany, have by 
no means clarified European ideas of “ literature ” so 
thoroughly as might have been expected. No doubt we 
would not now, with Hall am, apologize for neglecting 
such “ departments of literature ” as books on agriculture 
or English law ; still we have by no means reached any 
settled ideal of “ literature ” such as Hallam himself 
obscurely outlined by excluding history, save where it 
“ had been written with peculiar beauty of language or 
philosophical spirit,” from his Literature of Europe. 
Must we, then, surrender the word to the abuse alike of 
the learned and unlearned at the peril of some such 
caprice as that of Lamb — caprice not to be enjoyed as a 
freak of humour, but rather despised as the miscarriage 
of sober, possibly prosaic, inquiry? If we review the 
causes which have produced the abuse we shall at least 
understand the difficulties to which any definition of 
“ literature ” must be exposed. 

§ 2. The word literatura even among the Romans had 
no settled meaning. Tacitus uses the phrase literatura 
Graeca to express “the shapes of the Greek alphabet ; ” 
Quintilian calls grammar literatura ; and Cicero uses the 
word in the general sense of “ learning ” or “ erudition.” 
Accordingly, when scholars of the Renaissance began to 
use the word they did not intend to convey ideas which 
it now readily suggests. They did not intend to convey 
the idea of a body of writings representing the life of a 
given people ; much less did they purpose by using the 
word to draw distinctions between one class of such 
writings and another. Borrowing the word in its Latin 
significations, they did not stop to dream of days when 
modern nations would possess their own bodies of writings, 


6 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


just as they did not stop to inquire whether Greek or 
Latin ideas of the lyric, the epic, the drama, were suited 
or unsuited to the new life of Europe they saw around 
them. Greece and Eome, though rich in terms for 
special branches of poetry, oratory, or philosophy, had 
not in fact needed a word to express the general body of 
their writings as representing a national development. 
Greece had not needed such a word because she never was 
at one with herself, never attained to permanent national 
unity. Rome had not needed such a word partially 
because she passed, as if at one bound, from municipality 
to world-empire without halting to become a nation, par- 
tially because the cultured few who were the makers of 
her writings worked day and night upon Greek models. 
It was only when bodies of national writings, such as 
those of England and France, had been long enough in 
existence to attract reflection, it was only when the spread 
of democratic ideas in the eighteenth century began to 
make men regard the writings of their countrymen as 
something more than elegant copies of antique models 
made under the patronage of courts and princes, as in 
truth the fruits of the nation’s historic past, that the 
word “ literature ” became useful to mark an idea peculiar 
to the nations of modern Europe. But the word in 
which the new idea was embodied served rather to con- 
ceal than to disclose any conceptions of national author- 
ship. “ Literature,” long a mere generalization for letters 
or the knowledge of letters, classical or modern, was ill 
adapted to express the idea of a definite national growth. 

§ 3. One cause of the indefiniteness of “ literature ” 
we have thus found in the source from which the word 
has reached us ; another and more interesting cause we 
shall find in the development of social life. Karl Otfried 
Muller tells us how we may trace the three different 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


7 


stages of civilisation among the Greeks in the three 
grand divisions of their poetry ; how the epic belongs to 
a period of monarchical institutions when men’s minds 
were impregnated and swayed by legends handed down 
from antiquity ; how the elegiac, iambic, and lyric poetry 
arise in more agitated times and accompany the growth 
of republican governments ; and how the drama repre- 
sents the prime of Athenian power and freedom. But 
this is only one out of a host of such examples. Take 
any branch of verse or prose composition, and you soon 
find that directly or indirectly its existence implies 
certain conditions of social life. The oratory of the 
Athenian Ekklesia or the Roman Forum, of the English 
Parliament or the French Pulpit; the hymns of the 
Indian or Hebrew priests ; the rythmical prose of Hebrew 
or Arab poets ; the songs of the Homeric aoidos or the 
Saxon scop ; the chorus of the Khorovod in the Russian 
Mir or village-commune; Athenian, Roman, Sanskrit, 
Chinese, Japanese, English, French, and German dramas ; 
— all result from and reflect the action, thought, and speech 
peculiar to the particular places and particular times at 
which they appear. But this dependence on limited 
spheres of social life is concealed by the vague word 
literature.” Containing a generalization, and as such 
suggesting some abstract unity unconditioned by time 
and space, the word leads us to expect identity in the 
form and spirit of writing whenever and wherever it 
appears — an identity which does not strike us as false 
until repeated comparisons and contrasts have forced 
upon us the recognition of the falsity. We can easily 
understand how the enthusiastic study of classical models 
contributed to disseminate in modern Europe the idea 
ot this uniformity, and the belief that archetypes of 
“ literature ” bad been fixed once for all in the brilliant 


8 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


ages of Pericles and Augustus. We can easily under- 
stand bow the universal claims of medieval theology 
and philosophy directly or indirectly contributed to 
strengthen this belief in universal exemplars which 
threatened for a time to make the masterpieces of Athens 
and Home idols of literary imitation as unquestionable, 
if not as sacred, as the Qur’an. But it is not so easy to 
grasp the facts that “ literature,” far from enshrining 
universal forms and ideas of beauty, owes both its creative 
and critical works to the development of social life ; that 
familiar general or special conceptions suggested by the 
word drop off one bygone as we retrace the steps of such 
development ; and that all our subtle literary distinctions 
finally disappear in the songs of those isolated clans and 
tribes whose fusion produced the people and the language 
of future art and criticism. We may be sure that it is 
difficult to keep the varying relations of social develop- 
ment to literary growth steadily in view when we find 
a scholar like Mr. J. A. Symonds speaking of Athenian 
literature as “ National,” or an antiquary like Herr Ten 
Brink applying the phrase “National Epos” to days 
when the Saxons were merely a loose federation of 
tribes. 

Indeed, we have only to watch the beginnings of 
national history in order to see how readily the actual 
development of literature is obscured, how hardly it is 
to be recovered. Nations, like individuals, have been 
always disposed from interest or vanity to forget their 
day of small things; like individuals, too, they have 
been always unwilling to isolate their origins from the 
great ones who have gone before. Some -ZEneas will 
connect the pedigrees of Ilium and Borne, some Brute 
the Trojan will serve as an aristocratic eponymous 
ancestor for the wild tribes of Britain. Thus, at the 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


9 


price of mucli confusion in language and thought, the 
interlacing of national histories reproduces on an enlarged 
scale the interlacing of clan traditions which has every- 
where accompanied the fusion of clans into larger social 
groups. Thus, too, chronological standards, which can 
never carry us beyond the adult and self-conscious age 
of some particular group, are so applied as to raise the 
most confused impressions of relative antiquity in insti- 
tutions and thought ; and languages, customs, ideas, 
come to be reckoned old or young by measurements 
taken from the First Olympiad, or A.U.C., or B.C., or from 
the Flight. Hence, within the group, social develop- 
ment is obscured by inability or dislike to look back 
to times when national language and ideas could not 
exist ; without the group, it is obscured by imitation of 
peoples who have attained to higher grades of social 
progress ; and so the conception of national literature, as 
well as that of national history, becomes a medley of 
confusion in which differences of time and place, of social 
and individual character, are obliterated. Nothing but 
historical reflection can restore the real order of develop- 
ment out of this chaos ; and historical reflection, as a 
work of science, is only the tardy product of the present 
century. How recent are its applications to the domain 
of literature we may judge from two facts. Hallam, in 
1838, could truthfully say that “ France has no work of 
any sort, even an indifferent one, on the universal history 
of her literature; nor can we (Englishmen) claim for 
ourselves a single attempt of the most superficial kind.” 
Donaldson, in his “ Translator’s Preface ” to the first 
volume of Muller’s Literature of Ancient Greece, observed, 
in January, 1840, that “before the publication of the 
present work no history of Greek literature had been 
published in the English language.” 


10 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


§ 4. But if it be hard for the popular mind to avoid 
confusing early and adult conceptions of literature, the 
critical mind, from causes peculiar to itself, is exposed to 
a similar confusion. If the facts of social development 
have been almost unavoidably overlooked by average 
intelligence, they have been deliberately set aside by the 
professed critic. When men first began to ask themselves 
why it was that the poet’s works pleased them, they sought 
to find the cause not in human senses, emotions, intellect, 
but in analyses of the works themselves. Thus the 
Poetics , attributed to Aristotle, mark an effort to extract 
general principles of dramatic creation from the practice 
of the Athenian masters, Sophocles in particular. Few 
questions are asked about the development of the Athe- 
nian drama. The literary influences of Athenian life, 
contrasted with the life celebrated by the early epic and 
lyric poets of Greece, are ignored. No attempt is made to 
compare the drama of Athens with that of other Greek 
cities, much less to discover whether “ barbarians ” pos- 
sessed any similar spectacles. Thus, by neglecting the 
influences of social life on literature, Greek criticism 
fostered the deadly theories that literature is essentially 
an imitation of masterpieces, that its ideals are not pro- 
gressive but permanent, that they have no dependence on 
particular conditions of human character, on the nature 
of that social instrument language, on circumscribed 
spheres of time and place. In the imitative workmanship 
of Roman artists the principles of the Greek only gathered 
strength ; and, transmitted through Rome to the peoples 
of modern Europe, they everywhere more or less checked 
the growth of truly national literature. While the more 
vigorous life of England and Spain developed new forms 
of the drama, Italy and France accepted the classical 
models, Germany following their example. It is true 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


11 


that at length the learning of Germany revolted from a 
bondage in which it recognised a hybrid monster of 
Greek, Roman, and French extraction. It is true that 
France herself, especially after the Revolution had 
thrown her back on older memories than those of 
Richelieu’s centralism or Henri Quatre, came to learn 
the literary value of her own early history. But, in 
spite of these successes of the national against the 
classical spirit, one strong survival of classical influ- 
ences lingered, and still lingers, in the critical mind 
of Europe. If men like Goethe and Victor Hugo could 
cast off the bondage of Greek models, and appeal trium- 
phantly to the art of Shakspere and Calderon, criticism 
was still far from giving up those universal ideas which, 
logically enough, had accompanied the conception of 
literature as the imitation of universal models. Thus, 
for example, the main purpose of A. W. Schlegel’s 
defence of the “ Romantic School ” was to reconcile 
the conflicting principles of “ Romantic ” and classical 
art in universal ideas common to and underlying both ; 
and Coleridge upholds the universal claims of Shak- 
spere’s art with as much enthusiasm as any classical 
critic ever upheld those of the ancient masters. 

The truth is that the “ Romantic School ” represented 
reformers imperfectly conscious of the purport of their 
reforms. These dissidents from an ancient creed of 
critical dogma failed to see that if literary art is some- 
thing better than an imitation of models, if these models 
are admitted to be out of place when carried into social 
conditions markedly different from those under which 
they were produced, then the dependence of literary 
ideals on limited spheres of human association follows 
as a matter of course, and “ Romantic ” pretenders to 
universal rights are caught in the act of self-contradic- 


12 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


tion. Failure to observe this self-contradiction need not 
surprise any student of the social sciences. Political 
economists, for example, have based their science on 
assumptions of personal freedom, social classification, and 
human character which possess a very limited application 
even within the recent history of the English people ; 
yet such facts as medieval serfage, the different social 
classification of different countries and ages, or the im- 
possibility of action from self-interest in communal life, 
have only within the last few years prevented our 
economists from claiming universality for their theories. 
Again, English jurisprudence for a time did not hesitate 
to advance similar claims, although its leading idea of a 
central government, from which the commands, obliga- 
tions, and sanctions of law shall issue, is in the political 
life of early communities as clearly out of place as the 
literary ideals of Athens, Koine, or Paris would have 
been among the early Arab clans. If we find fault with 
the shortcomings of “ Romantic ” criticism we must 
remember that nothing is more difficult than to see an 
ideal without expanding it into universality even in the 
prosaic accuracy of scientific reasoning, how much more 
in works peculiarly belonging to the imagination — works 
in which the consciousness of thinking within limits is a 
fatal damper to the enthusiasm which creates without 
reflecting on the nature of its materials, and is paralysed 
when it attempts to critically retrace the steps of the 
creative process. Yet, unless we limit the range to 
which our criticism shall apply, we may find ourselves 
applying the standards of the Athenian to the Japanese 
drama, or those of the Greek lyric to the Shih King of 
ancient China. Clearly such limitless criticism has done 
much to obscure all ideas of literary development, and 
consequently to make the conception of literature the 
jnedjey we have found it. 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


13 


§ 5. But there are obstacles to the definition of 
literature which arise not from the origin of the word, nor 
from unhistorical ideas of the learned or the unlearned, 
but from the different and even conflicting aims of writ- 
ing in different states of social life and the different 
means adopted to secure such aims. “ By literature,” 
says Mr. Stopford Brooke, M we mean the written thoughts 
and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a 
way which will give pleasure to the reader ; ” and the 
same admirable critic adds that “ prose is not literature 
unless it have style and character and be written with 
curious care.” Without pausing to ask whether Mr. 
Brooke would extend his ideal of “ prose ” so as to cover 
the rythmical cadence of Al-Hariri, or the Chinese Tsze 
in which rimes are repeated at the end of lines of 
indeterminate length, without raising any questions about 
the development of prose, and allowing one ideal end of 
literature as opposed to science to be pleasure, not dis- 
covery or instruction, we find that the pleasure imparted 
by literature and the means of imparting it have in 
different states of social life varied surprisingly. For 
example, from our modern standpoint Professor J ebb is 
perhaps right in saying that “ there can be no literature 
without writing ; for literature implies fixed form ; and, 
though memory may do great feats, a merely oral tradi- 
tion cannot guarantee fixed form.” Yet we cannot forget 
that even at the zenith of Greek civilization music and 
dancing (to say nothing of acting) formed an integral 
part of certain literary pleasures to a degree which our 
modern familiarity with printed books renders almost 
inconceivable. Not only have the pleasures of literature 
varied with the average character of the men and women 
it addressed — from communal villagers singing their 
harvest hymn to the courtly audience of Boileau — but 


14 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the means to secure such pleasures have likewise varied 
from wild combinations of gesture, music, dance, and song, 
in which the words were of the least importance, to 
printed letters as the main instrument of the literary 
artist. Compare, for example, the so-called “ Pindaric ” 
odes of Gray with those of the Greek master himself, and 
nothing but our modern idea of literary art, as mainly an 
appeal to the eye and ear through print, can hide the 
grotesque absurdity of strophe and antistrophe reappear- 
ing like fleshless skeletons two thousand years after the 
dance and song that gave them life have died away. 

As the means so also the ideal ends of literary pro- 
duction have varied remarkably under different conditions 
of social life. The prevalent belief that the proper ends 
of science are discovery and instruction, but that of 
literature pleasure, the greatest pleasure of the greatest 
number in the given national group,* is due to develop- 
ments in social organisation and thought which have 
democratically expanded the audience of literature, 
specialised the pursuits of science, and established rather 
superficial distinctions between experience and its students 
on the one side and imagination and its votaries on the 
other. Some of these ideas would have been sadly out of 
place in days when the cultured few (as in Athens or 
Rome) reposed upon the labours of a mass of slaves; 
others, in days when science and literature were so closely 
intertwined as in the science-poetry of Empedocles or 
even the dialogues of Plato, would have been too con- 

# Mr. Palgrave ( Songs and Sonnets of Shalcespere, p. 237) tells us 
that “pleasure is the object of poetry ; aud the best fulfilment of its task 
is the greatest pleasure of the greatest number.” They who still fancy 
that literature in an age of democracy can remain the monopoly of a 
cultured Cloud-cuckoo-town will shrink from this use of a Philistine 
formula and resent the expression of poetry’s ideal end in an echo of 
Benthamism. But art and criticism, if they are living, must reflect con- 
temporary life and current thought. 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


15 


fused to supply distinctions. In fact, the differentiation 
of literature from science, however “ natural ” it may now 
look to us, was a process of slow and fitful evolution 
dependent not only on individual intelligence but on 
social development. The dependence of the ideal ends 
of literature on such development might be illustrated 
from the writings of every people, every social group, 
which has produced a literature of its own. If it may 
be seen from Spenser’s introductory letter to his Faerie 
Queene that our modern democratic conceptions of litera- 
ture have no place in his knightly theory of poetry as 
intended “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in 
virtuous and gentle discipline,” similar contrasts might 
be easily discovered between the early and modern 
ideals of song in France, or Germany, or Spain. But we 
need not confine our examples to European nations. 
The paternal government of China and the sentiments of 
family life which form the striking social characteristic 
of that vast empire have left their marks upon the 
ideals of Chinese literature in general and upon that 
of the Chinese drama in particular. “ Chinese poetry,” 
says M. Bazin (introduction to his Theatre Chinois, p. 
xxvii.), “ requires every dramatic work to have a moral 
end or meaning. For example, the moral purpose of the 
play called Tchao-mei-hiang , or A Maid's Intrigues, dis- 
covers itself in the words addressed by the lady Han 
to her daughter, ‘ Know you not that now, as in ancient 
times, the marriage of husband and wife needs to be 
consecrated by rites and ceremonies?’ The denoument 
is the triumph of virtue. Any play without a moral 
purpose is in Chinese eyes only a ridiculous work in 
which one can find no meaning. According to Chinese 
authors the object aimed at in a serious drama is to 
present the noblest lessons of history to the ignorant who 


16 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


know not how to read ; and, according to the Chinese 
penal code, the end of theatrical representations is ‘to 
exhibit true or imaginary pictures of just and good men, 
chaste women, and loving and dutiful children— characters 
likely to lead the spectators to the practice of virtue/ 
Obscenity is a crime ; and composers of obscene plays, 
says a Chinese writer quoted by Morrison, shall be 
severely punished in the abode of expiations, ming-fou, 
and their torment shall last as long as their plays remain 
on the earth.” 

Contrasting this aim of the Chinese drama with that 
of the aesthetic Athenian — for, in spite of the famous 
definition in the Poetics , we can scarcely speak of Attic 
tragedy, much less comedy, as possessing a moral pur- 
pose — critics who refuse to separate their ideals of litera- 
ture from those of human conduct will probably agree 
with M. Bazin in placing the Attic sense of the beautiful 
below the didactic morality of the Celestial. Aristo- 
phanes, it is to be feared, stands condemned by Chinese 
judgment to a very lengthy experience of ming-fou ; and 
as for such dramatists as Wycherley and Vanbrugh, their 
only hopes must depend on the rather dusty condition 
of their volumes Nowadays. It may be true that the 
Chinese ideal is higher than that of our modern European 
dramas, which would limit itself to the truthful imitation 
of human character and custom in contemporary life. 
It may be that the Chinese is superior to the Indian 
dramatic ideal laid down in the prologue of the Malati and 
Mddhava ,* and clearly expressing the dramatic taste of 
a cultured class such as the Brahmans of India are known 

* “Again,” says this prologue, “ wliat avails it to boast a knowledge 
of the Yoga, the Sankhya, the Upanishads, or the Vedas ? Such know- 
ledge is of no use for dramatic composition. Fertility of imagination, 
harmony of style, richness of invention — these are the qualities which 
mark education and genius in this kind of writing. Such is the drama 
written by our venerable friend Bhavabhuti.” 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


17 


to have been. But our object is not to canvass the merits 
of this or that dramatic ideal ; it is simply to show how 
widely such ideals have differed in different conditions of 
social life, and to illustrate by their conflict the difficulty, 
or rather impossibility, of reconciling such contradictions 
in any universal definition of literature which, be it 
remembered,* must also include many branches of verse 
and prose not to be found in the drama. 

§ 6. We have now reviewed four causes of the ob- 
scurity overhanging the word “literature” — the source 
from which it has reached us, unhistorical ideas about it 
entertained by the learned and the unlearned, the subtle 
changes in the means and the no less subtle changes in 
the ends of literary workmanship. In short, we have 
found what was to have been expected wherever the 
dependence of written upon living thought and of the 
latter upon social and physical conditions is overlooked 
— confused views of the present nature, the past, and the 
ideal future of literature. Other causes contributing to 
the same confusion might easily be added. For example, 
many problems properly belonging to any scientific treat- 
ment of literature are hidden away in more or less 
cognate studies. Thus, the origins of metres, if discussed 
at all, are generally treated as the worthless peculium of 
that broken-down philosopher, the grammarian; and 
rhetoric absorbs much of the interest which might be 
well bestowed on a subject so attractive as the develop- 
ments of prose in different languages and social groups. 
But we need not extend our search for the causes of an 
obscurity which average thinking and cultured taste con- 
curred to render unavoidable. 

Definite ideas of literature have, in truth, been 
impeded by two grand facts which theory may affect 
to conceal but cannot really banish — the fact that all 


18 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


literatures, even to some degree those wrought by the 
hand of mere imitators like the Eomans, depend upon 
conditions of social life, and, if not stationary or decaying, 
constantly throw out new forms of vitality, constantly 
enter new phases of art and criticism ; and the fact that, 
in spite of this constant movement in each separate 
literature, in all literatures viewed together as productions 
of humanity, definition implies, and must at least pro- 
visionally assume, a degree of permanence which is too 
often secured off-hand by violently declaring selected 
ideas to be universal and independent, not only of social 
life in its myriad shapes, but even of space and time. 
Hereafter we shall have other opportunities for discussing 
these obstacles to the scientific study of literature — 
obstacles, it must be remembered, common to all the 
social sciences, political economy, jurisprudence, even 
logic, so far as the laws of thought are dependent on 
social evolution. At present, however, we shall be 
satisfied with two principles which may serve to guide 
our efforts to reach defined ideas of literature. (1) Our 
definition cannot cover an unlimited range of human life 
save at the expense of confusing perceptions of sense, 
emotions, thoughts, not only belonging to widely diverse 
social and physical conditions, but often directly con- 
flicting in the form and spirit of their literary expression. 
(2) We must be ever prepared to forego our limited 
definitions of literature, or any species of literature, 
when we pass out of the conditions to which they are 
properly confined. 

Bearing these principles in mind, we may be content 
to set out with a rough definition of literature, as consist- 
ing of works which, w'hether in verse or prose, are the 
handicraft of imagination rather than reflection, aim at 
the pleasure of the greatest possible number of the 


WHAT IS LITERATURE? 


19 


nation rather than instruction and practical effects,* and 
appeal to general rather than specialised knowledge. 
Every element of this definition clearly depends on 
limited spheres of social and mental evolution — the 
separation of imagination from experience, of didactic 
purpose from aesthetic pleasure, and that specialisation 
of knowledge which is so largely due to the economic 
development known as “ division of labour.” In truth, 
our definition will carry us, and is intended to carry us, 
a very short way satisfactorily — perhaps no distance at 
all beyond conditions of art and science under which we 
live, or similar to these. If the student has expected 
something better, let him reflect that breadth of 
definition is only to be purchased by flagrant violations 
of the facts but just stated. He can, indeed, have no 
better introduction to the scientific study of literature 
than a definition which shall bring home one of the great 
lessons to be learned from this and every other science, 
the limited truth of human ideas. 

We have spoken of our study as a “ science ; ” let us 

* M. Victor de Laprade (La Sentiment de la Nature chez les 
Modernes ,” pp. 312-322), while discussing Goethe’s efforts to combine 
science with poetry, raises the question whether didactic poetry is at the 
present day a legitimate form of poetic art. In doing so he draws a 
careful distinction between the didactic poetry of Greece or India, and 
that of days in which “science has left the path of hypothesis and 
imagination, has become possessed of fixed methods and knows its 
proper limits.” In these latter conditions M. Laprade decides that 
didactic poetry is “ un genre batard, dangereux, a peu pres impossible ; ” 
that it is poetry at all only “ in proportion as it withdraws itself from 
science to enter into the imagination.” Goethe’s Faust may contain 
geology, optics, chemistry; his Wilhelm Meister, scientific discussions 
and demonstrations; but in his Elective Affinities there appears that 
“ fatalistic conception ” of scientific law before which human liberty, 
master-maker of literary art, would seem to disappear. But M. Laprade 
has scarcely touched the true cause of that dissatisfaction which the 
metaphysical as well as the didactic poetry of modern times can hardly 
fail to produce. This cause is to be found in the fact that poetry and 
literature in general are expected to address the average mind in average, 
not specialised, language; whereas science pursues its studies and 
expresses its truths in the technical language it requires. 


20 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


state at the outset the meaning we intend to convey by 
that term. It must be evident from what we have 
already said that by “ science ” we cannot mean a body 
of universal truths, that the very evolution of literature 
is fatal yer se to any such literary “ science.” But by 
the use of the term we mean to imply that limited truths 
discoverable in the various phases of literature may, nay, 
in order to be understood even as limited truths, must be 
grouped round certain central facts of comparatively 
permanent influence. Such facts are the climate, soil, 
animal and plant life of different countries ; such also is 
the principle of evolution from communal to individual 
life which we shall hereafter explain at length. The 
former may be called the statical influences to which 
literature has been everywhere exposed ; the latter may 
be called the dynamical principle of literature’s progress 
and decay. But before we attempt to explain this 
principle we shall illustrate the dependence of literature 
on social conditions, and the consequent relativity, or 
necessary limitation, alike of its creative art and criticism. 


CHAPTER II. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 

§ 7. Literature, however rude, however cultured, 
expresses the feelings and thoughts of men and women 
on physical nature, on animal life, on their own social 
communion, on their individual existence. It is in- 
cumbent, therefore, on the champions of universal literary 
ideas to discover the existence of some universal human 
nature which, unaffected by differences of language, social 
organisation, sex, climate, and similar causes, has been at 
all times and in all places the keystone of literary 
architecture. Is there one universal type of human 
character embracing and reconciling all the , conflicting 
differences of human types in the living world and in its 
historic or prehistoric past ? Can really scientific reasons 
be advanced in support of the sentimental belief in that 
colossal personage called “man,” whose abstract unity is 
allowed to put on new phases of external form, but whose 
“essence” is declared to remain unaltered? Unfortunately 
any such scientific inquiry has been generally supplanted 
by explosive or pathetic assertions of dogma. Yet the 
relativity of literature may not unaptly be illustrated by 
the dogmatic assertions of its opponents. 

Kingsley, in his address on “the limits of exact 
science as applied to history,” reminded his audience 


22 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


that “ if they wished to understand history they must try 
to understand men and women. For history is the history 
of men and women, and nothing else. If you should ask 
me how to study history I should answer, Take by all 
means biographies, wheresoever possible, autobiographies, 
and study them. Fill your minds with live human 
figures. Without doubt, history obeys and always has 
obeyed in the long run certain laws. But these laws 
assert themselves, and are to be discovered not in things 
but in persons, in the actions of human beings ; and just 
in proportion as we understand human beings shall we 
understand the laws which they have obeyed or which 
have avenged themselves on their disobedience. This 
may seem a truism; if it be such, it is one which we 
cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when the 
rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human 
beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions 
under the name of laws rather as persons than as things.” 
Kingsley’s confusion in this passage of physical, social, 
and political “laws” — orderly successions of the forces 
in physical nature and of cause and effect in social 
organisation with those commands of a person or body of 
persons which do indeed require to “assert themselves” 
and depend on the “ obedience ” of “ human beings ” — 
cannot easily escape detection. But with this confusion 
we are not at present particularly concerned. We prefer 
to observe how Kingsley has here expressed that side of 
history with which creative art finds itself most at home. 
Why? Because clear-cut personality, individual being 
without any touch of the collective and impersonal, is 
evidently capable of more concentrated interest, of more 
artistic treatment, than the hazy outline of a multitude 
or an impalpable abstraction. How, indeed, can an artist 
conceive the conduct of his hero or heroine as the 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


23 


expression of an impersonal “ law,” of an order of events 
to which innumerable social and physical causes have 
contributed?. It is the work of creative art to bring 
before us “live human figures;” and an artist’s view of 
literary and every other kind of history is best conceived 
from this strongly individual standpoint. But require- 
ments of art are one thing, truths of science another ; and 
a little reflection will convince us that Kingsley’s idea 
of character-history is far less truthful than artistic. 

§ 8. To understand history we must understand men 
and women. True ; but men and women are exceedingly 
complex units, and their treatment as purely isolated 
units would not only fail to contribute to the under- 
standing of history, but would tend to resolve all human 
knowledge into a mass of disconnected atoms among 
which all general principles and even thought itself 
would perish. In order to understand either ourselves 
or history we must therefore combine and compare these 
personal units with each other, with the rest of the 
animal world, with physical nature. The bodies of men 
and women consist of components which may be chemi- 
cally resolved into the vegetable and mineral elements 
of other animals and of physical nature. Their unreflect- 
ing emotions seem to be a current of sense-life not 
greatly different from that of other animals. But their 
social sympathies vary from a sense of obligation as 
narrow as that of clan-ties to one as wide as universal 
brotherhood ; and their individual reason varies from the 
'weakest sense of personal existence to the most profound 
depths of subjective philosophy. So far as the elements 
of each individual man or woman are shared with other 
animals and physical nature, we have certainly not 
reached the sphere of biographies or autobiographies. 
But when we have reached the sphere within which 


24 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


differences make their appearance not merely between 
human beings and physical nature, between human 
beings and other animals, but between different groups 
of men and women and different individuals composing 
these groups, it is a matter of little importance whether 
with Kingsley we use the concrete phrase “men and 
women,” or prefer to sum up varieties of group or 
individual in the highly abstract term “ man,” provided 
we never forget that our abstract groups as well as our 
individual “ men and women ” depend for their character 
on space and time, on conditions of social organisation, on 
physical influences, geographical, climatic, and the like. 

To select one out of many examples of the dependence 
of human character on social development, look at the 
different manner in which different literatures, or different 
periods of the same literature, have treated the characters 
of women. The status of women in different conditions 
of social life has left its marks in literary pictures of 
their character amazingly different. Simonides of Amor- 
gos, in a very famous poem, contrasted different types of 
female character by comparing them with a hog and a 
fox, a dog and an ass, a weasel, an ape, and a bee ; but 
if we were to search through the various likenesses of 
female character in literatures of the East and West, we 
might not only increase at will this uncomplimentary 
catalogue, but discover how profoundly female liberty 
or tutelage, public freedom or private seclusion, have 
affected the general and particular characters of women 
in different ages and countries. The women of Indian, 
Chinese, and Japanese dramas are, as we would anticipate, 
different enough from those of Attic tragedy and comedy, 
or from those of our modern European theatres. But 
such differences are by no means confined to countries 
so far removed from each other in social and physical 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


25 


circumstances. The careful study of any literature pos- 
sessing a history sufficiently long reveals the most diverse 
treatment of female character within its own limits. 
Even in the “ stationary ” East the heroines of the 
classical Indian dramas possess a degree of independ- 
ence impossible under the system of seclusion which 
has followed the Mohammedan conquest of India; and 
those of the early Chinese drama likewise contrast with 
the domestic prisoners of modern China described by 
the Abbe Grosier and others. But in the “ progressive ” 
West the evolution of female character may be more 
readily illustrated. Thus, Mr. Mahaffy has the merit 
of being among our earliest critics in contrasting the 
various conditions of women at different stages of social 
life in ancient Greece. The women of the Iliad and 
Odyssey — Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa — bring before us 
social relations very different from those of Aristophanes’ 
women. Elsewhere like contrasts may be seen. The 
songs of Miriam and Deborah, even the witch of Endor, 
carry us back to days of Hebrew social life when the 
woman possessed a status far higher than one of her lord’s 
harem. Again, the lloman women of the early republic, 
under the perpetual tutelage of their fathers, husbands, 
sons, or guardians, could have supplied no such rumours 
of ill fame as Juvenal voices, and, deprived of that free- 
dom which permits at once the development and the 
display of character, might have realized the Periclean 
ideal of the sex. But the lesson which comparative 
literature must draw from such contrasts is something 
more than the dependence of human character on social 
conditions ; it is also the impossibility of exact historic 
truth in the workmanship of literary art. In this impos- 
sibility lies one of the great facts which our phrase 
" relativity of literature 9 * is intended to mark. We 


26 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


shall, accordingly, illustrate its nature and bearing on the 
scientific treatment of literature. But let us first under- 
stand the full meaning of historical propriety by con- 
trasting it with the universal assumptions of unhistoric 
criticism. 

§ 9. Macaulay, commenting on some of Dryden’s 
plays ( Aurungzebe , the Indian Emperor, and the Conquest 
of Granada), observes that the sentiments put into the 
mouths of certain dramatis personte violate all historical 
propriety ; that, in fact, “ nothing similar was ever 
even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe. The 
truth of character is the first object, the truth of place 
and time is to be considered only in the second place. 
We blame Dry den, not because his characters are not 
Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and 
women — not because love as he represents it could not 
exist in a harem or a wigwam, but because it could not 
exist anywhere.” This is a moderate estimate of historical 
propriety, allowing, as it does, certain universal charac- 
teristics of all men and women while assigning a sub- 
ordinate position to those differences of time, place, and 
social life which it is the part of the historical artist to 
indicate. But our Shaksperian critics of the subjective 
school will have nothing to do with such limitations of 
art. Shakspere’s characters are to their minds true 
for all space and all time; nay, they rise above time 
and space, being apparently conceived, if not worked 
out, in an altogether Platonic world. Shakspere, says 
Coleridge, will not, like Plautus or Moliere, draw for us 
the character of a miser because such a character is not 
“permanent;” and Shakspere’s characters “ must be 
permanent , permanent while men continue men, because 
they stand on what is absolutely necessary to our exist- 
ence.” Certainly of permanence, in one sense, we have 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


27 


enough and to spare in Shakspere’s plays ; for his 
chivalrous and Christian men and women of the Eliza- 
bethan age, the clergy, the clowns, and even the London 
artisans, are permanent enough to find a place in the 
Rome of Coriolanus and of Julius Caesar impartially ; 
and if the dramatist had undertaken to depict the con- 
temporary life of Russia, Hindustan, or China, we cannot 
doubt that the conditions of his art would have demanded 
a similar display of “universal ideas,” and that the 
scenery of Warwick or some other English county would, 
if required, have done excellent duty in the country of 
Romanoff or of Shah Jehan as the physical background 
for English men and women in something like (or 
perhaps not at all like) Russian or Indian dress. 

We do not honour Shakspere by ignoring such truths; 
we merely display our ignorance of the necessary limita- 
tions of dramatic art which result from its social nature ; 
we merely impose upon ourselves the penalty of ignorance 
— self-contradiction. If we wish to see the contradictions 
into which the subjective school of criticism is perpetually 
betrayed by its anxiety to raise a human idol above the 
sphere of human associations, we need only compare dif- 
ferent passages of Coleridge or Carlyle inter se. Unwilling 
to find in the Elizabethan age the models of Shakspere’s 
characters, looking upon them as “ creatures of his medi- 
tation,” “ fragments of the divine mind that drew them,” 
Coleridge, in spite of his ultra-idealism, cannot avoid self- 
contradiction ; and his twofold defence of Shakspere’s 
“ conceits ” is a reductio ad absurdum of itself. “ If 
people would in idea throw themselves back a couple of 
centuries,” he says, “ they would find that conceits and 
puns were very allowable because very natural. We are 
not to forget that at the time Shakspere lived there was 
an attempt at, and an affectation of, quaintness and 


28 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


adornment, which emanated from the court, and against 
which satire was directed by Shakspere in the character 
of Osric in Hamlet .” So much for the critic’s admission 
of Shakspere’s dependence on the associations of his age, 
with which of course we have no fault to find save its inade- 
quacy. In treating the matter thus, Coleridge is aware 
that he is “ only palliating the practice of Shakspere ; 
he ought to have had nothing to do with merely temporary 
peculiarities ; he wrote not for his own only, but for all 
ages.” So far his conceits must be regarded as defects ; 
“ they detract sometimes from his universality as to time , 
person , and situation” * But the critic has already made 
the conceits and puns of Shakspere “ natural ”f or uni- 
versally proper ; the latter, he tells us, “ often arise out of 
a mingled sense of injury, and contempt of the person 
inflicting it, and as it seems to me, it is a natural way of 
expressing that mixed feeling.” Self-contradiction is 
likewise the fate of Carlyle’s Platonism ; he, too, in spite 
of a display of the mystic universal worthy of Novalis, is 
compelled to admit, for example, that “ Dante knows 
accurately and well what lies close to him ; but in such a 
time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could 
not know well what was distant.” Miserable fall ! for 
one who writes above space and time to depend on the 
printer’s “ devil ” or the telegraph-clerk. But even the 
author of Heroes and Hero-Worship allows that “ Dante 
does not come before us as a large Catholic mind, rather 
as a narrow and even sectarian mind,” and tnat this 
narrowness is at least “partly the fruit of his age and 
position ” — an opinion which any one who compares the 
social life of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries with the Divina Commedia will heartily endorse. 

* Lectures and Notes on Shaliespere (cd. T. Aslie), p. 93. 

f lb., p. 73. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


29 


If we are determined to lay down the dogma that 
Shakspere, or Dante, or any other poet wrote above space 
and time, above the social and physical conditions under 
which he lived, we really exclude historical propriety by 
a creed of literary inspiration which has been frequently 
asserted, if not believed in, with theological assurance. 
We imitate the criticism of the Arabs and make a 
literary Qur’an out of our Shakspere or Dante. “ Were 
we to examine the Qur’an,” says Baron de Slane,* “ by 
the rules of rhetoric and criticism as they are taught in 
Moslem schools, we should be obliged to acknowledge 
that it is the perfection of thought and precision — an 
inevitable result, as the Moslems drew their principles of 
rhetoric from this very book.” Reasoning in circles can 
supply as good foundations for a literary as for a theolo- 
gical creed, and save both a good many historical troubles. 
Yet it is remarkable that, in spite of their anti-historical 
dogma, our subjective critics are always anxious to show 
not only that Shakspere’s characters are, in Macaulay’s 
phrase, “ men and women,” but that they are the men and 
the women of the particular time and place which the poet 
represents on his stage. In the Rome of Coriolanus 
appear English drums and doublets, coals and bowls, and 
the Devil, English “ gentlemen,” “ testy magistrates ” 
from the Puritan Corporation of London, “ divines ” and 
“ bare heads in a congregation ” (Cor. iii. 2), while the 
servants of an English household take the place of slaves ; 
and in the streets and Forum “ Hob and Dick ” (Cor. 
ii. 3), and the London trades oust by the rights of a free 
bourgeoisie the slaves and freemen of the Eternal City. 
But is it not pedantry to be careful about these things ? 
And if an English clock strikes in the Rome of J ulius 
Csesar, or rime is there spoken of, or a proper English 

* Preface to translation of Ibn Kliallikan’s Biographical Dictionary. 


30 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


clown appears in Cleopatra’s Alexandria, why not dismiss 
the anachronism with a smile ? Because to do so would 
be to accept false views of human nature and of dramatic 
art; because the historical critic cannot forget that he 
who mistakes the social life of a group must misinterpret 
the characters of its individual units, that he who Lon- 
donises the public life of the Boman plebs is sure to 
Christianise or feudalise the private relations, feelings, 
thoughts of the Boman wife and mother and son and 
father. We are told by critics who should know better 
that “ Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Boman life and 
character; ” and the most accurate historian will scarcely 
dislodge the notion that the great dramatist’s English 
“histories” are altogether correct descriptions of the 
individual and social characters of their times and places. 
But this shallow universalism is merely a last resource of 
subjective critics whose method — at least in the hands of 
such an extremist as Coleridge — is almost as fatal to true 
historical science as the Moslem belief that the language 
and ideas of their Bible came direct from God Himself. 
In opposition to all such critics, we are prepared to 
maintain not only that Shakspere’s historical characters 
are often highly inaccurate, but that attempts of the kind, 
if they are to be dramatically successful, must be inaccu- 
rate ; that the inaccuracy results from the most profound 
truth about literary and all human ideas — their limitation 
or relativity ; and that the subjective critics are not only 
mistaken in their views of individual character, through 
overlooking the social, but that they have failed to grasp 
the real conditions of dramatic art. 

§ 10. The dramatist draws his characters of men and 
women not for himself, not to be visible only to his own 
eyes, or to eyes as penetrating as his own, but to*,live and 
move and have their being in the sympathies and antipa- 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


31 


thies, in the senses and emotions, in the imaginations and 
intellect of his audience. This is the reason why the 
drama discloses in some respects better than any other 
branch of literature the average character of the age.* 
Orestes on the stage is driven to crime and madness by 
the effects of a long descent of inherited sin, but the 
feelings and beliefs which make his story tragic are in 
the heads and hearts of the Athenian audience. 

The Ali or Hosein of the Persian passion-plays are 
figures splendidly and tragically beautiful, not as the 
aesthetic workmanship of any writer, but because they 
are seen through mists of religious faith by the devout 
audience of the telcya . The sensuality of a Vanbrugh 
lived in the hearts of his audience before it walked his 
stage. The refined intrigue of a Moliere or Sheridan 
was performed to the life in courtly circles before it was 
dramatised. This is why the Eoman plays of Ben Jonson 
were a failure, while those of Shakspere succeeded. What 
mattered it whether the Catiline of Sallust or the Seja- 
nus of Tacitus wore presented to Elizabethan men and 

* M. Bazin (Theatre Cliinois , introduction, p. li.) makes some observa- 
tions on literature in general, and the drama in particular, as reflecting 
the forms of social life, which may be here translated. “ We have already 
remarked that literary productions initiate us more rapidly and sometimes 
more accurately in the secrets of social institutions than works apparently 
more serious ; and we do not fear to maintain that probably not a single 
Chinese play exists which does not throw light on some facts altogether 
ignored. Thus, the comedy translated by Davis has determined the true 
position of the legal concubine contrasted with the legitimate wife. Before 
the publication of that comedy the oblations of the Chinese at the tombs 
of their parents were often mentioned ; but did we know the prayers 
which they recite in these mournful ceremonies or the terms of the ritual 
they employ ? Does not the first drama of this (M. Bazin’s own) collec- 
tion furnish an example of marriage brought about by order of the emperor, 
and for the celebration of which the couple and the parents are freed from 
the formalities prescribed by custom and the rites ? The piece called 
The Singer similarly presents us with the formula of contract-of-sale in 
the case of a child; moreover, we find in it a scene which, as far as the 
evidence goes, proves that the sale was simply a mode of adoption. Such 
facts, it must be admitted, were at least very obscure points in Chinese 
character and custom.” 


32 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


women? They had to live in Elizabethan feelings or 
they were dead, long since dead, and, worst of all, not 
buried out of sight. He who, as Walt Whitman says, 
“ drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them 
again on their feet,” who “says to the past, Rise and 
walk before me that I may realize you,” is the truly 
great dramatist ; but to do this the puppets of the show 
must move along many a subtle wire which the feelings 
of the audience have supplied, but which their intellect 
shall not detect. The tribute of the heart must be paid 
to the past much as the Chinese offer their oblations to 
living persons representing their deceased ancestors ; and 
no culture of the intellect must be allowed to destroy the 
fiction. So the “ Romans ” of Shakspere might not be 
historical Romans, might not even belong to the social 
life of Rome at all, but they were living human figures 
for the men and women of the Elizabethan theatre 
because they resembled themselves. The women of Shak- 
spere’s “ Roman ” dramas — Portia, Calphurnia, Yolumnia, 
Yirgilia — are not really pagans ; they are Christian 
women, married by Christian marriage, and standing 
towards their sons and husbands in the Christian and 
chivalrous relations of family life. Yolumnia enjoys a 
position which perpetual tutelage could not have tole- 
rated; and the public freedom of the Roman woman is 
conceived in a thoroughly Elizabethan, or rather Eliza- 
bethan-London spirit. So, too, the men of Shakspere’s 
Roman plays are as free from any sentiments of the 
Roman family as Elizabethan London can make them ; 
and if in the Rome of Coriolanus we have clergy, and 
Christian clergy too, (“ Hang ’em ! I would they would 
forget me, like the virtues which our divines lose by 
’em.” Cor. ii. 3), Coriolanus himself is more a medieval 
knight than a Roman citizen. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


33 


All this is historically inaccurate ; but it is so just 
because no dramatic or other poet is universal in his con- 
ceptions of character any more than in his conceptions 
of plants, or animals, or scenery. It is so because the 
social and individual developments of character prevent 
historical accuracy save at the expense of that conscious 
contrast between our own and different social and physical 
environments in which science delights but art perishes. 
It is so because historical accuracy is banished by the 
conditions of language and thought under which the 
dramatist writes, and through which his art must work. 
It is so because the dramatists similes and metaphors, as 
well as his men and women, are not derived from “airy 
nothing/’ nor from an equally airy everything, but from 
a limited sphere of human associations, of animal and 
plant life, of physical nature. If a contemporary people, 
differing from ourselves in language and customs, should 
supply our stage with characters or incidents, strict accu- 
racy is for similar reasons impossible. Thus the Persians 
of ^Eschylus, though the Athenians must have known a 
good deal about the would-be conquerors of Greece, 
are to a considerable degree Persians in Attic dress ; 
and when Shakspere merely reminds us that we are 
in France by an occasional phrase like the Dauphins 
“chevai volant,” or by the mixture of French and Eng- 
lish in the scene between Katharine and Alice, he dis- 
plays a far deeper acquaintance with dramatic art than 
Plautus, who in his Pcenulus makes the Carthaginian 
Hanno deliver a speech in Phoenician which, for the 
benefit of the audience, he is compelled immediately to 
translate into Latin. So closely is the dramatist bound 
within the limited sphere of his audience’s thoughts and 
feelings, so completely does he depend on their average 
associations and the degree of social evolution they have 


34 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


attained. If the autos sacramentales of Calderon, with 
their abstract and allegorical personages, and their intense 
feelings of Roman Catholicism, would fail to awaken pro- 
found sympathy save in a devoutly religious people like 
the Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
— a people among whom the average feelings and intelli- 
gence of men and women would give life even to such 
personages in the sacred spectacle — the mysteries of 
medieval England would be something worse than a 
farce in the England of to-day. Turn where we may, 
we shall meet the relativity of dramatic art wherever a 
drama of any description has been developed. 

§ 11. But the critical as well as the creative spirit of 
the drama serves to illustrate that limitation of literary 
art which results from the development of social and in- 
dividual character. Such an illustration, for example, is 
supplied by the three famous unities over which so much 
angry and dogmatic discussion has been expended. The 
unities of time, place, and action have been very differ- 
ently understood and derived. A. W. Schlegel has been 
at some trouble to show that they are not found in the 
Poetics — at least in the form which Erench criticism had 
fathered upon Aristotle. Coleridge sees in them the 
results of the Greek chorus, the centre of the Athenian 
drama, not to be easily moved from place to place, or 
from time to time. Others have regarded them as result- 
ing from the architectural arrangements of the Greek 
theatre. Every one knows how differently they have 
been discussed and valued in different ages of European 
literature. Victor Hugo, for example, tells us that if 
w'e imprison the drama in a classical unity of place, “ we 
only see the elbows of the action ; its hands are else- 
where.” * Shall w r e reduce our dramatic time to twenty- 
* Preface to Cromicell (p. 24). 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


35 


four hours ? The same poet and critic reminds us that 
every action has its own duration, that to apply the same 
time-measurements to every action would be to act like 
a shoemaker who could make only one size of shoe for 
all sizes of feet. Moreover, it is easy to show that 
“ unity of action ” is a very indefinite phrase, which 
might mean harmony of character with conditions of 
place and time, or harmony of events with the central 
incident of the drama, or both of these combined and 
confused. But it would be a serious error to rise from 
the study of conflicting opinions on the nature and origin 
of the unities with a self-satisfied belief that, whatever 
the classic rules may owe to the theatres of Athens and 
Paris, we may now rest in a broad declaration that we 
hold with the “ Romantic School,’’ and that the unities 
have no significance beyond the ancient drama and its 
modern imitators. The truth is that under an aspect 
conventional, pedantic, and therefore repulsive alike to 
creative and critical freedom, the unities conceal an 
attempt to solve certain problems involving the highest 
efforts of philosophic inquiry. The need of dramatic 
limitation in space, time, and action is no mere whim of 
critical fancy. It rests on truths which the evolution 
of man, socially and individually, establishes, and which 
his animal and physical environments amply confirm. 

The drama is a picture of individual character, 
social life, and, to some degree — in Indian, Chinese, and 
Japanese plays to a considerable degree — physical 
nature. If its characters and social life are patchworks 
of different ages — sentiments of blood-revenge blended 
with courtly refinement, associations of Elizabethan 
London in the Rome of Caesar or the Athens of Alci- 
biades — we only enjoy the medley seriously so long as 
we are unconscious of the historical contrasts which, to 
3 


36 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 

the eyes of those who can see them, cannot but lend the 
most solemn tragedy a look of caricature. In this way 
scientific knowledge may incapacitate us for pleasures 
which depend on limited vision. This will be seen from 
a case which Mr. E. B. Tylor, in his Anthropology , inci- 
dentally notices. “ The negro,” says Mr. Tylor, “ in spite 
of his name, is not black, but deep brown, and even this 
darkest hue does not appear at the beginning of life, for 
the newborn negro child is reddish brown, soon becoming 
slaty grey, and then darkening. Nor does the darkest 
tint ever extend over the negro’s whole body, but the 
soles and palms are brown. When Blumenbach, the 
anthropologist, saw Kemble play Othello (made up, in 
the usual way, with blackened face and black gloves, 
to represent a negro), he complained that the whole 
illusion was spoilt for him when the actor opened his 
hands.” Descriptions of impossible scenery [and animal 
life in which the flora and fauna of India and Iceland, 
England and China, should be indiscriminately confused, 
will not strike the listener or onlooker as ridiculous if he 
knows nothing of such distinctions. So also w r ith human 
character and customs. A play to be performed before 
an audience of antiquaries would need to reach their 
standard of accuracy ; and every one sees how different 
this standard would be from that of an ordinary audience. 
But every one does not see that the difference between 
the scientific few and the unscientific many is only on a 
smaller scale the difference between an uncivilised and a 
civilised audience ; that the degrees of accuracy demanded 
increase with the widening ranges of experience, with an 
expanding sphere of comparison and contrast. Still less 
does every one see that in social and individual character 
there are limits to this accuracy resulting from the direct 
conflict between feelings and ideas of very limited evolu- 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


37 


tion, and those of one far more advanced. It is just in 
such widening spheres of social development — clan, city, 
nation — and this impossibility of representing certain 
species of human character save as contrasts to our own, 
that the relativity of literature peculiarly discloses 
itself. 

Social circumstances, it may be added, possibly pro- 
duced the local limitations of the Athenian tragedy quite 
as much as the chorus or the architecture of the theatre. 
We have seen how differences of custom and language 
give rise to a conflict between what can and what cannot 
be dramatically represented through the medium of the 
spectators’ speech, and thoughts, and feelings ; and in the 
practice (not the merely critical rules) of the unities, 
especially that of place, it is possible that we have an 
unconscious feeling of such a conflict. But, it will be 
asked, how could Greeks, so slow to compare “ barbarian ” 
manners and customs with their own, so disdainful of 
everything beyond their own Greek associations, acquire 
any sense of social contrasts as affecting dramatic art ? 
By the striking social and political contrasts of their 
little city commonwealths, contrasts to which the intel- 
lectual energy of Greece was so largely due. Here were 
opportunities for the recognition of relativity in miniature. 
What was true of individualised life at Athens was by 
no means true in the corporate organisation and senti- 
ments of Sparta ; the men and women of the Asiatic 
Ionians differed in many respects from those of Thessaly 
or Boeotia ; and differences of dialect helped to emphasise 
those of social and political life. When we remember 
how largely these contrasts contributed to create the 
comparative thinking of the Sophists, and (by force of 
repulsion) the universal ethic of Socrates and the 
universal metaphysic of Plato, we cannot help believing 


38 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


that Greek contrasts, social and political, within the 
narrowest local limits, may have affected Athenian tragedy 
and limited its spheres of local propriety. The local 
differences of feudalism and the medieval towns were far 
indeed from producing any sucli limitations in the mys- 
teries and miracle-plays. But why ? Because a world- 
creed had in the mean time supplied Europe with a vision 
of the world’s past and future before which all local and 
temporal distinctions appeared to vanish. But in the 
little commonwealths of early Greece, local differences 
formed the very life-blood of local character and patriot- 
ism ; and it was not until the days of Isokrates and 
Alexander that the Greek ceased to be a citizen in order 
to become a cultured cosmopolitan. 

§ 12. But the drama is far from being the only branch 
of literature from which literary relativity may be illus- 
trated. The lyric — to use a vague but necessary gene- 
ralisation — will supply the student of comparative litera- 
ture with many evidences of its dependence on social 
and individual evolution. Mr. Palgrave (in the preface 
to his Golden Treasury of English Lyrics) has attempted 
to define the meaning of “ lyric,” but, as he himself 
admits, with no very remarkable success. Lyrical, he 
holds, “ essentially implies that each poem shall turn on 
some single thought, feeling, or situation ; ” “ narrative, 
descriptive, and didactic poems have been excluded ; ” so, 
too, “humorous poetry, except where a truly poetical 
tone pervades the wdiole ; ” and “ blank verse, the ten- 
syllable couplet, with all pieces markedly dramatic, 
have been rejected as alien from what is commonly under- 
stood by song, and rarely conforming to lyrical conditions 
in treatment.” We must be struck by the variety of 
elements on which this definition depends — elements of 
spirit, such as thoughts and feelings, and elements of form, 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


39 


such as the metres employed ; and yet this is little more 
than an effort to define the English “ lyric.” Turn to 
Dr. Buchreim’s Deutsche Lyrih , and we shall find even 
greater varieties of spirit (the Volhsleid, the Kirchenlied, 
songs of the Gottingen Hainhund, of Goethe, of the War 
of Liberation, of personal Weltschmerz) and of form (from 
the metres of Luther to those of Heine) in the develop- 
ment of the German “lyric.” If, moreover, we were 
to examine the songs of France or Spain, of Italy or 
Russia — to say nothing of the literatures of the East — 
we should find many other and conflicting varieties of 
form and spirit summed up in the generalisation “ lyric.” 
Reverting, then, to Mr. Palgrave’s attempted definition, 
* it would be easy to prove that the lyrical idea it expresses 
can claim only limited truth even within the literary 
evolution of England. But students of comparative 
literature should rather thank Mr. Palgrave for an 
anthology exquisitely illustrating “ the natural growth 
and evolution of our poetry ” than find fault with a 
definition to which that evolution necessarily allows only 
limited accuracy. 

The truth is that “ lyric ” poetry has changed pro- 
digiously both in form and spirit, not only with differences 
of language and nationality, but with the alterations 
which social and individual character undergo in the 
development of any given community. If in the songs 
of the Sliih King we find the sentiments of the Chinese 
family and its ancestor-worship, if in the hymns of the 
Big- Veda we discover the spirit of the early Indian com- 
munities and their nature-worship, the song of the Saxon 
Scop with its appeal to clan feelings, of the Norman 
troubadour with its feudal chivalry, of the English 
minstrel on Chevy Chace or Robin Hood, remind us that 
each country has its own " lyrical ” developments ex- 


40 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


pressing the changes of its social life. The “ lyric ” has 
varied from sacred or magical hymns and odes of priest- 
bards, only fulfilling their purpose when sung, and 
perhaps never consigned to writing at all, down to written 
expressions of individual feeling from which all accom- 
paniments of dance or music have ‘been severed, and 
nothing remains but such melody as printed verse can 
convey, and the eye or ear of the individual reader detect. 
In the rude beginnings of literature among loosely 
federated clans we find the communal “ lyric ” reflecting 
the corporate organisms and ideas of contemporary life. 
Even in Pindar, the communal, as opposed to the indi- 
vidual characteristics of the “ lyric,” are still visible, 
the*victor of the games being often merely a centre round 
which the achievements of his clan or city are grouped. 
But as the old communal brotherhoods break up before 
the powers of the chiefs’ families, as even family life is 
in its turn weakened in city democracies, the “ lyric ” 
becomes more and more an expression of individual feel- 
ings. No doubt we have excellent specimens of com- 
munal “ lyrics ” on a colossal scale at the present day — 
the sea-songs of England, the war-songs of France, the 
German Freiheits - und Vaterlandslieder — and whenever 
any great movement sets masses of our modern men on 
foot, we may be sure that a Campbell or a Korner will 
be ready to sound its reveille in song. But the develop- 
ment of individualism has left its marks deep upon the 
modern “lyric.” The span-life of the individual con- 
trasted with the corporate existence of social groups and 
of the human species, contrasted still more regretfully 
with the apparent eternity of physical nature, becomes 
a recurring theme in social conditions which thrust the 
life of the individual into vivid consciousness of itself, 
its brevity, and its littleness. It is this individualism 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 41 

which invests with such intense feeling our “ lyric ” poetry 
of youth and age, which lingers over personal associations 
within the limits of its own time and space with a sadness 
almost inexpressible in the language of any group, and 
which watches the withering of its own passions and 
emotions with the conviction that “ there’s not a joy the 
world can give like that it takes away.” 

“ Dewdrops are the gems of morning, 

But the tears of mournful eve.” 

§ 13. Formal distinctions in literature often survive in 
the language of criticism into conditions totally different 
from those among which they arose. Our European 
criticism has in this way inherited from the Greeks such 
words as “ epic,” “ lyric,” “ dramatic,” which we have 
learned to bandy to and fro with astonishing facility. 
But though these words are so constantly on our lips that 
we have come to regard the ideas they generalise as not 
only permanent, but almost sufficiently concrete to be 
touched and handled, we rarely remember that the con- 
ceptions they denoted for Greeks differ greatly from 
those which we denote by the same names, that their 
meanings varied among the Greeks themselves at different 
stages of their civilisation, that among Greeks, as among 
ourselves, there were days when none of these literary 
forms existed, much less were distinguished inter se, and 
that there have been and are states of social life in which 
only some or even none of them have been either developed 
or named.* As rarely is it remembered that other peoples 

* Mr. Matthew Arnold (preface to his edition of Wordsworth’s Poems) 
has observed with justice that Wordsworth’s method of classifying his 
own poetry as belonging to “fancy,” “ imagination,” and the like sources 
— that is, classifying by “a supposed unity of mental origin” — is “in- 
genious but far-fetched.” But when Mr. Arnold proceeds to maintain 
that “ the tact of the Greeks in matters of this kind was infallible, that 
their categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural 


42 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


(ourselves included) have produced literary forms un- 
known to the Greeks, or that countries widely removed 
from European culture possess such forms as no European 
language can correctly express, because among no 
European people have they been developed. Our a priori 
notions of “ epic,” “ lyric,” " dramatic,” can only be dis- 
pelled by such comparisons ; and not until we have taken 
the trouble to trace the rise of different species of litera- 
ture in different countries, and have thus learned the 
more or less different general and special ideas of litera- 
ture entertained in each, can we hope to rise above the 
gross errors to which such a priori notions must expose us. 

We have already seen the weakness of searching for 
universal conceptions of the “ lyric ; ” let us now turn 
for illustrations of a similar weakness to the “epic.” 
When Hallam contrasts Paradise Lost in choice of sub- 
ject with the Iliad, Odyssey , 2Eneid, Pharsalia , Thebaid, 
Jerusalem Delivered , he implies that all these poems 
belong to a common species which he calls “heroic 
poetry ; ” and, according to Macaulay, in his comparison 
of Milton with Dante, this is “ the highest class of human 
compositions.” Now, whether we use the name “epic” 
or “ heroic ” is, of course, a verbal matter ; the important 
point is that we declare certain poems of very different 
ages and countries to possess certain common character- 
istics, and to approach some universal model. Of such 
a model Coleridge was evidently thinking when he said 

propriety and should be adhered to,” we cannot help refusing our assent, 
not because we have any objections to urge against the Greek classifica- 
tions of their own poetry, or the various uses to which modern critics have 
applied them, but because neither the art nor the criticism of the Greeks 
(or any other people) can possess that infallibility and “ natural ” propriety 
which Mr. Arnold would admire. If we find a certain propriety in Greek 
classifications, it is not because they possess any universal “ nature,” but 
because, shorn of many ideas they conveyed to the Greek mind, they fall 
in with modern modes of thought and conceptions of life similar in some 
respects to those of the Greeks, especially the Alexandrian Greeks. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


43 


that an “epic” poem “must either be national or 
common to all mankind.” Such common characteristics 
M. Geruzez seeks when, criticising Voltaire ( Histoire dc 
la Litterature Frangaise, yol. ii. p. 410), he says that 
“scenes depicted with vigour, portraits sketched by an 
artist powerful and ingenious, some beautiful lines, some 
noble ideas well expressed, are not enough to make an 
epic ; there must be varied characters, personages full of 
action and heroic life, communion between heaven and 
earth, in fine, unity of action and interest — vital condi- 
tions which are not observed in the Henriade.” These 
marks of an “epic,” evidently collected from Homer and 
Vergil, do not carry us much farther than Johnson, who 
praised the “universal” interest of Paradise Lost and 
the “integrity” (or unity) of its design. Possibly 
M. Geruzez did not mean to say more than that the 
“epics” of Greece and Rome are models of such com- 
positions ; and we can hardly object to the harmless 
assertion that persons or poems are models of themselves. 
But when Johnson tells us that the question “whether 
the poem {Paradise Lost) can be properly termed heroic 
is raised by such readers as draw their principles of 
judgment rather from books than from reason,” we may 
see that he at least, like Schlegel and Coleridge, is 
thinking of some universal model not to be discovered in 
the Iliad or other epics, but innate in the human heart 
or intellect as a kind of literary conscience. If our sub- 
jective critics would only stop to ask how far their literary 
conscience extends, to what countries, or ages, or social 
groups it belongs or does not belong, we should soon 
hear no more of universal ideas of the “epic” or any 
other species of literature. But it is much easier, much 
more showy, to talk and, if possible, to think in the free 
and splendid language of universals than to accept the 


44 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


awkward consciousness of a prisoner confined within the 
necessary limitations of human thought. We may judge, 
however, from these examples of the “epic” idea — the 
word “ epos ” * simply takes us back to the rise of 
poetical recitation without musical accompaniment, and 
suggests the Arab Beciter — the necessity of insisting on 
the relativity of literary growth to social evolution as 
opposed, on the one hand, to the treatment of literature 
as the mere imitation of arbitrary models ; and, on the 
other hand, to a priori conceptions alike of the genus 
literature and of its species. 

§ 14. We shall now seek the signs of literary re- 
lativity, not in the comparison of different species of 
literature, nor in the different characters of men and 
women in various stages of social life, but in that effort 
to transfer the thoughts expressed in the language of 
one social group into that of another, which we call 
translation. How far is accuracy of translation possible ? 
It is clear that both in prose and verse there are diffi- 
culties in the way of the translator sometimes insur- 
mountable. Even in prose translation objects such as 
animals or plants nameless in the translator’s language, 
or customs and institutions unknown to his group, or 
ideas, political, religious, philosophic, similarly nameless, 
may present such obstacles. But in verse, besides these 
difficulties, there is the close connection between sounds 
and ideas which in every language is more or less recog- 
nisable. For example, in the Chinese drama Ho-han- 

* “Epos” (root vep , cf. Latin vox) seems at an early period of Greek 
life to liave been used especially of an oracular “ saying.” These “say- 
ings” were given in verse (the development of metre and music being in 
early Greece, as elsewhere, partly in priestly hands), and so “ epos ” came 
to mean “ a verse.” When lyric songs set to music, “ mele,” as the Greeks 
called them, .came to be distinguished from merely spoken verses, the 
“epos” or “recited poetry” was separated from the “melos ” or “ poetry 
of song.” (Cf. the recurring invocation, ecrTrere pot, MoGircu, “recite for me, 
ye Muses,” and the root ceir-.) 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


45 


chan , Tchang-i’s delight at the falling snow is expressed 
by changing the regular stanza, apparently reserved for 
dignified monologues and solemn descriptions, into the 
irregular or free measure which frees itself from the rule 
which subjects Chinese verse to the double yoke of 
caesura and alliteration ; in short, as M. Bazin says, “ we 
must be able to read the verses in the original to gain 
an idea of the harmony which subsists between the style 
and the situation of the personage.” How can this 
harmony be retained in the process of translating into 
any European language? If an effort were made to 
reproduce the Chinese metres in English, for example, 
the result would look ridiculous, even if it w'ere not a 
complete failure ; but that it would be a complete failure 
is clear from the fact which another Chinese scholar 
(Sir John Francis Davis) observes, viz. “ that every word 
in Chinese poetry, instead of being regarded as a mere 
syllable, may more properly be regarded as corresponding 
to a metrical foot in other languages.” Hence, one of 
the striking characteristics of Chinese verse is its paral- 
lelism in sound and sense, which has been compared with 
the parallelism of Hebrew poetry so carefully discussed 
by Lowth. Suppose, then, we were to translate a stanza 
of Chinese parallelism into Hebrew, would the result 
convey the Chinese form without alterations due to the 
Semitic dress? Ear from it. The formations of the 
Semitic verb, noun, and particle are so different from 
the monosyllabic Chinese, that nothing like the Chinese 
parallelism could be produced either in Hebrew or 
Arabic. Here, then, is a case to illustrate the depen- 
dence of that harmony of sound and idea which we call 
“ verse ” upon the different sound-structures of languages, 
sound-structures which must be attributed to the varying 
appreciation of sounds possessed by the peoples whose 


46 


COM r Alt ATI VE LITERATURE. 


social developments made the languages, and which may 
be as untransferable into a given Semitic or Aryan speech 
as certain barbarous notes of music into our European 
system of musical notation. Moreover, this Chinese 
example is only adopted because it is peculiarly striking. 
The same relativity of linguistic sounds to the group by 
which the language is spoken may be illustrated by con- 
trasting, say, Arabic sounds and metres with Sanskrit, or 
Italian with English, or Russian with German, or by 
observing the loss of the hexameter and the appearance 
of a new form of verse with the rise of modern Greek in 
the eleventh century. We may, indeed, gauge to some 
degree the progress of discrimination in sounds by con- 
trasting the ruder forms and metres in a given people’s 
language with the more advanced — the confused union 
of syllabic and metrical scansion in Plautus with the 
Pope-like smoothness of Vergil, a similar confusion in 
Chaucer with the machine-like regularity of the ten- 
syllable couplet, the monotonous repetition of rimes in 
the Chansons de Geste* with the Alexandrine of modern 
France, or (to take two examples from prose) the harsh 
antitheses of Thucydides with the delicate perceptions 
of sound in Isokrates, and the clumsy sentences of Milton 
with the modulated harmony of Ruskin. Such progress 

* The rudeness of this versification, says M. Geruzez (Hist, de la Lilt • 
Fran vol. i. p. 27), is marked by monorimes, of indeterminate length, 
'which only stop when the trouvere, having exhausted his final consonants 
or assonants, thinks fit to continue his psalmody on another rime till it, 
too, is in its turn exhausted. In the Kasida of the Arabs (to which we 
shall elsewhere refer) the same rime is, likewise, repeated, only in this 
case at the end of every verse throughout the entire poem, and the rawi> 
or “ bindfast ” letter, which remains the same throughout, may be com- 
pared to a rivet driven through the verses and holding them together. 
(Cf. Wright’s Arabic Grammar , vol. ii. pp. 378, 379, and the European and 
Arab authorities cited by Dr. Wright on p. 377.) In ages when writing 
was either unknown or the monopoly of a few, it is clear that this repetition 
of the same rime would have supplied a powerful prop for the memory. 
But on this subject we shall have something to say presently. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


47 


in the appreciation of sounds explains, indeed, the failure 
of attempts to modernise early poetry, such as those of 
Dryden and Pope. In such cases we expect the old 
harmony between earlier sounds and ideas to be kept up 
by the moderniser, whose ideas and sounds are both more 
or less different, and consequently the harmony into 
which he transforms the old verse. Our expectation is, 
of course, disappointed ; it overlooks at once the subtle 
progress we have observed, and the peculiar fitness of 
certain sounds for certain ideas — a fitness which the 
poet of any age, just in proportion as he is a poet, is 
sure to detect and to express for him who has the ears 
to hear. 

If there ever lived a poet who was likely to clearly 
express these very subtle relations of sound, speech, and 
thought, and their effects on translation, that poet was 
Shelley ; and, though it often happens that a man who 
himself knows how to produce an effect has not reflected 
upon his powers so as to rationally explain their opera- 
tion, we may see from the following quotation that 
Shelley was not unconscious of the process by which his 
own exquisite harmonies of word and thought were pro- 
duced, and the impossibility of transferring them from 
one language to another, which must needs be a different 
sound-instrument. “Sounds, as well as thoughts,” says 
Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry , “ have relations both 
between each other and towards that which they repre- 
sent ; and a perception of the order of these relations 
has always been found connected with a perception of the 
order of the relations of thought. Hence, the language 
of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and har- 
monious recurrence of sound, without which it were not 
poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the 
communication of its influence than the words them- 


48 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


selves without reference to that particular order. Hence 
the vanity of translation ; it were as wise to cast a violet 
into a crucible that you might discover the formal prin- 
ciple of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from 
one language into another the creation of a poet.” The 
Aramaic expression for translating ( tar gem , from which 
our “ dragoman ” is descended) conveys the figure of 
“ throwing a bundle over a river ; ” and the truth is that 
in the translation process the bundle never arrives at 
the other side exactly as it was before starting. Lan- 
guage, in fact, is a sound-catalogue of all the objects and 
thoughts familiar to the community to which it belongs, 
be that community ever so small or ever so large, be it an 
African tribe or the widespread speakers of English or 
Arabic, be its average senses— sight, hearing, touch, 
taste — as sharp, but uncesthetic, as those of an American 
Indian, or as aesthetically appreciative, though perhaps 
physically inferior, as those of the most cultured people. 
With the contents of this catalogue the individual 
makers of a group’s literature must be content. Beyond 
it they cannot pass. To modify it to any appreciable 
degree they cannot hope. Their work, so far as the 
sound-materials they use, is one of arrangement not of 
creation, and, in one sense, they are the servants of the 
language they employ. If that language is full and 
melodious, such is their treasury of expression. If it is 
poor and rude, they can only hope to make the best use 
of materials which have been made for them, not by 
them.* Even the intensely developed individualism of 

* The relative influences of inflectional and analytic languages on 
metre are subjects deserving careful attention. The most superficial 
observer cannot fail to remark that the former, allowing greater freedom 
of position to words, tend to foster metrical scansion such as the poetry of 
Greece and Rome presents, while the latter, allowing far less freedom of 
position, tend to prefer the less stringent systems of rime or assonance. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


49 


Greek literature could not overlook this truth. For 
example, Professor Jebb, in his admirable account of 
the “ Attic Orators,” observes that one of the leading con- 
trasts between Athenian and modern eloquence, such as 
that of Pitt or Burke, is to be found in the artistic feel- 
ing of the Greek orators, who, having once discovered a 
combination of words peculiarly fitted to convey a certain 
combination of ideas, do not hesitate to repeat such a 
sentence or phrase; whereas the modern orator, from 
whom at least the appearance of an extempore speech is 
expected, carefully avoids such repetitions. These rela- 
tions of sound to idea may, moreover, partially explain 
two facts exceedingly interesting in the development of 
literature, the growth of poetic diction and the deca- 
dence of poetry in an age of analytic thought — facts in 
which we shall find further illustrations of the relativity 
of literature to social life. 

§ 15. We are all familiar with Wordsworth’s concep- 
tion of “ poetic diction ” as an “ unnatural ” growth. 
The early poets of all nations, he tells us, wrote generally 
from passions excited by real events; they wrote “natu- 
rally,” and so their language was daring and figurative in 
the highest degree. But succeeding poets mechanically 
adopted such language, applied it “to feelings and 

thoughts with which it had no natural connection what- 
© 

soever,” and insensibly produced a language “ differing 
materially from the real language of men in any situa- 
tion.” This conception of “ poetic diction ” as a “ dis- 
torted language,” gradually separated from that of real 
life, is only true of certain literary epochs which may be 

It is no mere accident that the Greek and Latin metres admit of easy 
imitation in German, with its comparatively strong inflections, while in 
English, the language of lost inflections, efforts such as those of Tenny- 
son, Longfellow, A. H. Clough, contrast feebly with those of Schiller and 
Goethe. 


50 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


called epochs of classical imitation. It would be easy to 
show that some of the grandest specimens of poetry in 
the world (Greek and Indian epics, for example) offer 
many a mark of stereotyped diction in repeated epithets. 
Partially, such epithets may be attributed to an early and 
inartistic age in which the dependence of memory on the 
verse — writing being yet unknown — must have tended to 
stereotype many a striking epithet as a kind of resting- 
place for the memory. So far, “ poetic diction ” would 
seem to be the common property of poetic guilds, 
religious or secular, common aids to the memory of bard- 
clans like the Homeridae. But partially, also, “poetic 
diction ” may be attributed to a very real feeling of art, 
the feeling that made the Greek orator rest assured that 
an exquisite turn of phrase, when once discovered, was 
the most artistic combination of thought and sound of 
which his language was capable, and should be repeated 
in preference to any search for variety. “ Form,” says 
Victor Hugo,* “is something much more fixed than people 
suppose. It is an error, for example, to think that one 
and the same thought can be written in many ways, that 
one and the same idea can have many forms. One idea 
has never more than one form peculiarly its own, excel- 
lent, complete, rigorous, essential, the form preferred by 
it, and which always springs en bloc with it from the brain 
of the man of genius. Hence in the great poets nothing 
is more inseparable, nothing more united, nothing more 
consubstantial, than the idea and the expression of the 
idea. Kill the form and you nearly always kill the idea.” 
Here is a conception of “ poetic diction ” which is neither 
that of lifeless imitation nor that of antique epithets 
stereotyped as aids for the memory, one by no means 
peculiar to Victor Hugo, but which, wherever we find it, 
* Littcrature et Philosophic, vol. i. p. xxiv. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


51 


derives its significance from the figure of an artistic indi- 
vidual author gathering with free hand in the garden of 
his country’s language such words as shall blend with his 
ideas in a beautiful harmony of thought and speech. 
Days without writing when poetic guilds were the great 
conservators of human tradition — days of courtly imita- 
tors crowning their brows with the withered roses of 
buried poets — days of democratic art when he who has 
the living spirit is free to choose its proper embodiment — 
so various are the epochs of social life and literature to 
which “poetic diction” may belong, so different are the 
facts and the ideas which it may express. 

But, it will be asked, how does the decadence of 
poetry in an age of analytic thought illustrate the 
dependence of literature on social conditions? Can we 
find any connecting links between analytic thought and 
social conditions, and between both of these and the spirit 
and form of poetry ? We have seen how closely related 
are the idea and its embodiment, the thought and the 
language, of poetry, and how different are the harmonies 
in which they may be combined in different societies or 
in different ages of the same society. Sever such 
relations between sound and idea by the separate con- 
sideration of each in scientific analysis, and you reach 
the inartistic or analytic conception of prose as the 
proper instrument of reflection and totally unconnected 
with poetic form — you Aristotelise your prose ; and poetry, 
so far as it depends on the harmony of sound and idea, 
vanishes before a “philosophic” contempt which would 
ridicule or deny altogether the subtle relations of sound 
and idea in the languages of social groups. But, however 
analytic thinkers may deride such relations, the forms of 
poetry, and even of prose to some degree,* prove by the 

# “The constructional parallelism of sentences,” says Sir J. F. Davis 


52 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


best of human proofs — evidences unconsciously given — 
the existence of harmonies between idea and sound vary- 
ing in different states of language and social life. Still, 
it may be asked, where is the connection between analytic 
or individualising thought and social conditions ? How 
is the desire to see the individual object in preference to 
the general idea connected with social evolution? Let 
social life be decomposed into individual units, let men’s 
sympathies be narrowed into the sphere of self, in a 
word, let the group be individualised, and we shall find 
that men’s imagination is impaired, that it ceases to 
pass spontaneously beyond self, that it too becomes 
individualised. Such imagination may be wondrously 
inspired by nature, but hardly by human life. Thus the 
individualising process in social life which thrusts analytic 
thinking to the front, not only impairs the sympathetic 
imagination — and there is little imagination without 
sympathy — but undermines the belief in those harmonies 
of sound and thought of which poetry so largely consists. 
We may, therefore, find a very profound relation between 
what are called “prosaic” ages and individualism in 
social life, as w r ell as between “ poetical ” ages and such 
social conditions as foster imagination by their vigorous 
sympathies, and do not affect to break the harmony of 
sound and idea by refined analysis. 

But if we turn from men and their languages and life to 
animal and physical nature, we shall not only find the rela- 

(Chinese Poetry, p. 20), extends to prose composition, and is very fre- 
quent in what is called Wan-chang or “fine writing” — a measured prose, 
though not written line beside line, like poetry. Other examples of 
rhythmical prose (or the recognition of harmony between sound and idea 
in prose), such as the Hebrew and Arabic, are well known ; and it is to 
be remembered that such prose manifested itself among peoples unac- 
customed to that analytic thought which carved out of Greek, Latin, and 
modern languages prose instruments for itself. Mr. Ruskin is certainly 
not an analytic thinker; so much the belter for the delicate rhythm of his 
prose. 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


53 


tivity of literature in the different kinds of animals and 
plants and scenery it depicts — the physical, or, as we formerly 
called it statical, relativity of literature — but even dis- 
cover new aspects of its social relativity already discussed. 

§ 16. The mere presence of a beautiful physical 
environment can do little towards the creation of a 
beautiful literature if social life moves under conditions 
adverse to sentiments of sympathy with nature. This 
man who, like Wordsworth’s Wanderer, has lived among 
the wildest and grandest scenery earth can offer, is moved 
by none but petty motives, and reflects in his spirit 
neither the dignity nor the beauty of his native moun- 
tains. Another, who has passed his life in the grimy 
atmosphere of an English factory, surveys with boundless 
delight the ice-field of a glacier or the dizzy dangers of 
an Alpine pass. The sturdy, narrow-minded mountaineer 
is callous to sights and sounds of nature, whose gigantic 
features have not merely lost their interest for him from 
their constant presence, but have always been associated 
in his mind with very real hardships. Such common 
cases as these warn us against rashly inferring any sense 
of natural beauty or any deep sympathy with nature in 
consequence of her companionship with man, no matter 
how beautiful the dress she may wear. From under the 
rainbow arch of the cataract rises the witch of the Alps — 
but for whom? For Manfred, or rather for Byron’s 
shadow called “ Manfred,” for one whose intense feeling 
of self has turned away from man to nature for poetic 
inspiration. What cares the chamois-hunter for witch or 
cataract ? Search the pages of Greek poets and orators, 
and you will rarely find a picture of the varying forms 
of nature such as our town-begotten literatures of modern 
Europe present with rather monotonous frequency. And 
yet the literature of Athens, in a far deeper sense than 


54 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


that of modern England, France, or Germany, is town- 
begotten. Whence comes the contrast ? From the 
different aspects not only of physical, but much more of 
social, life. The isolated city commonwealths of Greece 
saw beyond their own walls little but the work-fields of 
their slaves, or an exposed borderland which war and 
brigandage were perpetually devastating ; where roads, if 
they existed at all, were as often the highways of enemies 
as the conductors of friends, and where the best of 
nature’s favours would be a network of impassable rocks, 
to be valued for their practical defence, not admired for 
any beauty of their scenery. So, too, with the expanding 
town-sovereignty of Rome. Into the wilderness of nature 
and men uncivilised she throws her outposts of armed 
towns, and views with infinitely deeper sympathy the 
tiresome regularity of her military roads than all the 
splendid scenery of lake and mountain coming within 
the widening horizon of her empire. This is the march 
of human force armed cap-a-pie ; before it nature is good 
for growing corn, raising men and cattle, for the soldier’s 
ambuscade or the evolutions of horse and foot — and that 
is all. If the Roman poet turns his face away for a 
moment from the Forum and the city-folk to nature, it 
is (like Vergil) to nature humanised as the agricultural 
mainstay of man’s life, or (like Lucretius) to nature 
humanised for the purposes of social theory. In the same 
way different social conditions in contemporary life may 
be observed to affect the aspects of nature; the same 
physical circumstances summon up different associations 
for the bards of the Homeric princes and for Hesiod, the 
singer of the people ; the country life wears a different 
look for the medieval burgher and the medieval knight. 
Schiller tells us * that the sun of Homer still shines on 

* “ Und die Sonne Homers, siehe ! sie lachelt auch uns.” • 

(J)er Spaziergang .) 


RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE. 


55 


us; but, though the sunshine be the same, nature has 
changed her looks since the days of Homer, of Athens, 
of Home, not only because our vision of the world has 
been greatly widened and corrected by discovery, but 
even more on account of changed conditions in social life. 

If such effects attended municipal life in ancient 
Greece and Italy, if men under such social conditions 
could not feel the life of nature till it was humanised — as 
it was even by Theocritus — we shall be prepared to find 
a very different aspect of nature in the literature of a 
social life widely removed from that of Athens or Home. 
Sanskrit poetry, as readers of such a poem as the “Indian 
Song of Songs ” need hardly be reminded, is full of 
adoring reverence for nature and her elements. More- 
over, contrary to European ideas of dramatic propriety, 
the Indian drama delights in lengthy and vivid descrip- 
tions of nature. Thus in Mrichchhakatt , or “ The Toy- 
Cart,” we have a description of the Indian rainy season 
which we shall elsewhere quote ; and the splendid forest- 
scene in Vikramorvasi completely subordinates man to 
nature. This strong sentiment of nature cannot be 
attributed to Indian scenery and climate alone. The 
Greek, too, was surrounded by splendid scenery ; yet, as 
Schiller says, nature appealed to his understanding 
rather than his feelings, and while his few descriptions 
of nature are faithful and circumstantial, they exhibit 
only such warmth of sympathy as the embroidery of a 
garment or the workmanship of a shield might arouse. 
To understand the contrasts of Indian and Greek sym- 
pathy with nature, we must remember the Indian village 
community and the Greek city as well as the scenery by 
which they were each surrounded. Nor is the explana- 
tion to be found solely in the village and agricultural life 
of India contrasted with the city communities of Greece. 


56 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


The system of caste, with its corporate and impersonal 
conceptions of human being, could not humanise nature 
in at all the same manner as that strongly-developed 
individualism which meets us in the cities of Greece. 
Ideas of human existence more or less impersonal are 
found in all early communities where, as in the clan, the 
individual is morally merged in the corporate being of 
his group; and the weak sense of personality in such 
social conditions is readily transferred to the phenomena 
of nature. Indeed, one of the main results of that 
development of personal consciousness which everywhere 
accompanies that of individual independence from com- 
munal restraints, is to see nature no longer clothed in 
the confused and confusing garb of man’s early personality, 
but in clear contrast with a profound consciousness of each 
man’s individual being. 

But we have now illustrated the social and physical 
relativity of literature at sufficient length. It is time for 
us to ask what use the scientific student of literature can 
make of such relativity. Over and above the influences 
of climate and scenery, plant-life and animal-life, can we 
discover any tolerably permanent principle of social 
evolution round which the facts of literary growth and 
decay may be grouped ? And, assuming that some such 
principle has been discovered, what is the proper method 
by which the collection of facts and their reference to 
this central principle shall proceed ? It is to these 
questions that we now propose to turn ; and first to the 
problem whether the growth and decay of literature 
contain any such guiding principle in spite of their 
apparent chaos of limited causes and effects. 


CHAPTER III. 


TIIE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 

§ 17. Sir Walter Scott, in his preface to the Bridal of 
Triermain , published in 1813, offered some remarks “on 
what has been called romantic poetry.” Though the 
main object of these remarks was to deprecate the 
practice of selecting “ epic ” subjects after the Homeric 
model, they contain a passage which, apparently without 
any conception of this particular bearing on the author’s 
part, touches a most profound problem, not only of 
literature, but of all human thought. The passage is as 
follows : “ Two or three figures, well grouped, suit the 
artist better than a crowd, for whatever purpose 
assembled. For the same reason, a scene immediately 
presented to the imagination and directly brought home 
to the feelings, though involving the fate of but one or 
two persons, is more favourable for poetry than the 
political struggles and convulsions which influence the 
fate of kingdoms. The former are within the reach and 
comprehension of all, and, if depicted with vigour, 
seldom fail to fix attention ; the other, if more sublime, 
are more vague and distant, less capable of being 
distinctly understood, and infinitely less capable of 
exciting the sentiments which it is the very purpose of 
poetry to inspire. To generalise is always to destroy effect. 


58 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


We would, for example, be more interested in the fate of 
an individual soldier in combat than in the grand events 
of a general action ; in the happiness of two lovers raised 
from misery and anxiety to peace and union than in the 
successful exertions of a whole nation. From what 
causes this may originate is a separate and obviously 
immaterial consideration. Before ascribing this peculi- 
arity to causes decidedly and odiously selfish, it is proper 
to recollect that while men see only a limited space, and 
while their affections and conduct are regulated, not by 
aspiring at an universal good, but by exerting their 
power of making themselves and others happy within the 
limited scale allotted to each individual, so long will 
individual history and individual virtue be the readier 
and more accessible road to general interest and atten- 
tion ; and perhaps we may add that it is the more useful, 
as well as the more accessible, inasmuch as it affords an 
example capable of being easily imitated.” 

The limited range of living human sympathy is, no 
doubt, a key to many secrets of our modern literature ; 
but it is not true that individual character has always 
been the centre of human interest, or that generalisation 
in all states of society “destroys effect.” The indi- 
vidualism on which Sir Walter Scott bases his theory 
of poetry has been evolved from conditions under which 
men and women were more deeply interested in social 
action and communal sympathies than in any emotions 
or thoughts of personal being. If we compare the early 
dramas of Athens, England, France, we discover certain 
points of similarity which cannot be attributed to imita- 
tion ; and the most striking of these resemblances is the 
absence or weakness of individual character. In the 
medieval mysteries and morality-plays, as is well known, 
the so-called “ characters ” introduced are either divine 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 


59 


or allegorical — God and His angels, Satan and his devils, 
Justice, Mercy, and the like. We are accustomed to 
regard these abstract or general personages as the 
handiwork of the monks and medieval religion. We 
are accustomed to credit these spectacles as well as the 
scholastic lovers of abstractions with a profound desire 
to express the invisible and the infinite in their art and 
philosophy. But let us not confuse the idealism of a 
Plato or a Berkeley with the average thought of peoples 
saturated with superstitions grossly materialistic and 
narrowly limited in their intellectual and social views — 
men and women who forgot limitations of space and time 
in feudalised pictures of Hebrew, or Greek, or Roman 
antiquity, not because of their “ universal ” ideas, but 
because they were incapable of apprehending even very 
limited ideas correctly ; who could only see the crucifixion 
through the associations of knights or burghers, and 
who reduced divinity with an almost savage confidence 
to the compass of their human senses and the little 
sphere of their sensual wit. Such men, such women, can 
have possessed no real conceptions of the infinite, can 
be credited with no true efforts to express it. The 
“ realism ” of the Middle Ages — which shines out as 
clearly in their dramas and allegorical “ epic ” poetry 
as in their formulated philosophy — is but a weak power 
of abstraction seeking to prop its steps on every kind of 
external object. Far from indicating a lofty feeling for 
the invisible and infinite, it shows how short a distance 
the human mind could then travel without perpetual 
returns to the visible. This “realism,” as well as the 
allegorical and abstract characters of the medieval 
mysteries and moralities, reflects a weak sense of person- 
ality which is found in all early stages of social life, and 
to which the social organisations of medieval Europe 


60 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


contributed in a manner to be hereafter discussed. But 
let us pause to note certain evidences of the same weak- 
ness in the early drama of Athens. 

The weakness of character-drawing in the early 
Athenian drama cannot escape the most superficial 
student of Athenian literature. Thus in the Prome- 
theus of ZEschylus we have Violence (B la) and Force 
(Kpdroc) executing the will of Zeus against Forethought 
(n po/biriOevg) ; and, as iEschylean critics have often 
observed, the chorus, and not the individual characters, 
may be seen to predominate in the dramas of iEschylus. 
Far from the Athenians of the -ZEschylean age being, in 
Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, “ more interested in the fate 
of an individual soldier than in the grand events of a 
general action,” the Suppliants (the earliest Greek play 
extant) turns entirely on the action and character of its 
chorus — the fifty daughters of Danaus ; the Persians 
derives its name from the chorus of twelve Persian elders, 
and is far less individual than social in its interest ; and 
the Eumenides centres in the action and character of the 
Furies who form its chorus, supply its name, and make 
the allegorical personifications of the inherited curse — 
a conception of impersonal ethics with difficulty har- 
monised in the later Athenian drama with freedom of 
personal character. Moreover, when we follow the deve- 
lopments of the ancient and modern dramas, we find a 
striking similarity in their progressive treatment of 
character. By degrees the divine, saintly, or allegorical 
personages of our medieval stage give way to human 
character in its contemporary individualities, and the 
tragedy or comedy of real life is reached. So, also, in 
the Athenian drama. The chorus, dominant, as we 
noticed, in iEschylus, is by Sophocles subordinated to 
individual character, and by Euripides is finally converted 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 


61 


into a mere spectator. Heroic personages are, indeed, 
retained, but only as the external clothing, the stage 
“ properties,” under which varieties of individual charac- 
ter may be put forward. Allegorical personages, like 
Demos and Eirene, “ The People,” and “ The Peace,” 
walk the stage side by side with living celebrities, just 
as in the “ Miracle du Saint Guillaume du Desert.” * 
Saint Bernard, the famous Abbe de Clairvaux, figures 
beside Beelzebub and the rest. And, at length, the open 
introduction of everyday life banishes or altogether sub- 
ordinates the mythical heroes and allegorical characters 
of old Athenian tragedy and comedy. It will not, of 
course, be supposed that individual character in the 
Athens of iEschylus was as weakly developed as in the 
French Communes of the twelfth century or the early 
German town-guilds, much less that the social life of 
Athens at the time of Euripides did not differ in many 
respects from that of England and Spain, of Italy, 
France, and Germany, at the appearance of the legiti- 
mate drama in modern Europe. But they who will 
remember how inherited sin supplied the pivot con- 
ception of theatrical ethics in Athens, and how a grossly 
sensual view of vicarious punishment supplied the ethical 
doctrine of the mystery-plays, will admit that weak ideas 
of individual responsibility and character imparted as 
much interest to early Athenian tragedy as to the medi- 
eval spectacles. Wherein do we find the causes of such 
similarity ? The answer to this question discloses that 
principle of literary growth to which in preceding pages 
we have incidentally referred. 

§ 18. The development of individual character is at 
the outset confused by certain facts which tend to mis- 

* See Miracles de Noslre Dame , edited for the Ancient French 
Texts Society, by MM. Oaston Paris and Ulysse Robert. 


62 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


lead both the makers and the critics of literature. It is 
easy to forget that the very existence of a literature 
implies a considerable degree of social and linguistic 
unity, and that such unity involves the break-up, more 
or less, of those miniature communities, clans, and tribes 
in whose corporate and unindividualised ideas we find 
the roots of early religion, law, and literature. Thanks 
to such scholars as Yon Maurer and Nasse, Emile de 
Laveleye and Sir Henry Maine, we now know more of 
these little circles of kinship than we ever did before. 
We know that, with more or less modification, they are 
to be found in every part of the East and West, and that 
wherever they have perished survivals of their existence 
have been left in human action or thought. But we too 
often forget that in literature, in the productions which 
states of social communion on a much larger scale than 
that of clan or tribe have thought worthy of transmission, 
we must view any survivals from these early communities 
through the medium of much later associations. Hence 
it is easy to be deceived by the prominence of individual 
life in the Iliad, or Beowulf, or the Nibelungenlied. Yet 
this prominence is readily enough explained. The clan 
communities, whose impersonal conceptions of ownership, 
contract, crime, have only been recovered because at the 
birth of central government they forced themselves on 
the recognition of a weak authority, were in the process 
of their decomposition into larger groups (such as tribal 
federations) subordinated to military and religious chiefs ; 
and it was only when this process had reached a con- 
siderably advanced stage that writing began to be 
employed, and, in the interests of the widening social 
groups, legends of clans once isolated were combined and 
centred round this or that eponymous ancestor, this or 
that individual hero. Literature, therefore, apparently 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 


63 


begins in some countries with the prominence of the 
individual. But we must remember that this early 
individualism is something very different from that to 
which our modern associations are accustomed. The 
chief of clan or tribe represents his group. Such personi- 
fications of the group we are liable to confuse with indi- 
vidual character in the modern sense. We are liable to 
forget that personality in an age of even weakened com- 
munal life means something quite different from person- 
ality in an age when individual independence — feudal 
or democratic — has been developed. Some leading ideas 
of clan life will sufficiently illustrate not only the differ- 
ences which set a gulf between primitive and highly- 
evolved personality, but also the hopelessness of attempt- 
ing to understand the nature of social evolution without 
attending to such differences. 

The clan, as such, knows nothing of personal respon- 
sibility in a future state, for its corporate view of life 
needs no such individual sanction for morality. The 
Hades of the clan, therefore, like that of the Odyssey or 
like the Hebrew She' 61, is merely a subterranean gathering- 
place of buried kinsmen whose life is a pale reflection of 
their life on earth. Keward and punishment, the terrors 
or consolations of an individualism not yet developed, 
have here no place, and for a reason easy enough to 
understand. This reason is that each clan, as a corpora- 
tion which “ never dies,” suffers, or is liable to suffer, for 
the sins committed by any of its members as long as 
atonement is not made. Hence the place of personal 
reward or punishment in a future state is taken by cor- 
porate responsibility in the present life. Just as among 
the Bedawi the rights and liabilities of Thar or Blood- 
Bevenge extend to the fifth generation, so in all clan 
communities responsibility is more or less an impersonal 


64 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


matter. Hence, too, there is nothing illogical to the clan 
mind in the sacrifice of an innocent man as a compensa- 
tion for the sin of a guilty member or of the group ; such 
a sacrifice only becomes illogical when the idea of indi- 
vidual intention and personal responsibility is clearly 
realised. Hence, also, as the clans lose their communal 
character (for example, by their land ceasing to be com- 
mon property, and their ties of kinship being weakened 
by artificial expansion) and are broken down into their 
component families and individuals, ideas of inherited 
guilt survive into the new social conditions, and are mis- 
applied to purely individual life in a manner which can 
only issue in a conflict between personal intention and 
corporate responsibility. It is by this kind of survival 
that we find inherited guilt the leading ethical doctrine 
of the Athenian drama in its earlier period — for example, 
in the Seven against Thebes, in the Orestian trilogy, in 
CEdipous Tyrannus . It has been observed that the subtle 
Greek gradually altered the old and gross conception of 
inherited guilt into a personal liability to commit fresh 
offences, and so to incur divine vengeance. In this way 
his growing individualism avoided such a direct repudia- 
tion of inherited sin as the less subtle Hebrew found him- 
self compelled to utter. But even conceptions of im- 
personal responsibility so considerably removed from the 
oldest and purest life of the clan as the ethics of the 
early Athenian drama are enough to show the gulf which 
separates our modem analyses of intention, and conse- 
quently our ideas of personal character, from days in 
which the individual was morally merged in his group. 
Indeed, the survival of such conceptions in the highly- 
intellectual atmosphere of Athens is altogether a more 
remarkable fact than the condemnation of belief in in- 
herited guilt, the ethics of the Decalogue, by Ezekiel 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 


65 


(ch. xviii.). If the latter proves that in Ezekiel’s age 
the communal sympathies of the old Hebrew clans 
( mislipaclioth ) had dwindled into an individuality with 
which inherited guilt came into direct collision, the 
former should prepare us for survivals from the imper- 
sonal view of human character in any state of social life, 
however civilised, however favourable to individual in- 
dependence. 

§ 19. Impersonal ideas of human character, mainly 
resulting from certain forms of social organisation, are 
thus the source of the similarity we have observed 
between the early dramas of Athens and modern Europe. 
If such ideas are in Athens survivals from the corporate 
life of the clan, a life gradually expanded into the entire 
demos of the city commonwealth and at the same time 
narrowed into an evolution of individual culture, they are 
in medieval Europe due to a resurrection of corporate life 
in the towns whose rise everywhere marked the decadence 
of feudal individualism. If clan communities have been 
in literature more or less concealed from view by the 
fact that only during their absorption into larger groups 
and their decomposition into individualised life has 
literature to any considerable extent made its appearance, 
if they were fused into cities and nations, the town com- 
munities of the Middle Ages likewise lost their corporate 
sentiments by becoming the local organs of monarchical 
centres, and neither the literature of feudal castles nor 
that of kingly courts could sympathise with their cor- 
porate life. But we must here remember another cause of 
the darkness which hangs between us and really archaic 
conceptions of human character. In any comparison of 
the classical and modern literatures of Europe in their 
early developments w^e must be ready to allow for the 
influence of a world-religion (as well as a world-language) 


66 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


on barbaric and medieval imagination and intellect. 
Christianity, like the eagle wounded by an arrow which 
a feather of its own had winged, is to-day attacked by 
social and physical theories which claim to rule a wider 
empire of time and space ; but at the Christianising of 
Europe, this majestic world-religion must have opened 
up such visions of human unity as the barbarians would 
have needed centuries of internal conflict, civilisation, 
and philosophy to approximate. To the Europe of the 
barbarian hordes Christianity came as a ready-made 
philosophy — a philosophy, moreover, not too refined to 
touch certain deep feelings of clan life ; indeed, two 
leading conceptions of the new faith were identical with 
conceptions long familiar to such life, viz. inherited sin 
and vicarious punishment. So far as these doctrines were 
concerned, Christianity did not introduce new ideas ; it 
simply extended ideas already existing, within small 
circles, to a range apparently boundless. How, then, it 
may be asked, did the Christian world-religion contribute 
to throw ideas of clan life and impersonal character into 
the background ? 

The Christian conceptions of personal immortality, 
personal reward or punishment in a future state, must 
have contrasted curiously with the usual doctrines of clan 
ethics. We cannot here attempt to trace at any length 
the influence of this individualism on barbarian feelings ; 
we need only observe how largely it must have contri- 
buted to strengthen such sentiments of personal indepen- 
dence as had been developed among the tribal chiefs 
before Christianity became known to them. As in the 
two social lives of early Greece brought before us by the 
contrast of Homer with Hesiod — the life of the chiefs 
splendid with heroic ideals and personal prowess, the life 
of the villagers oppressed with poverty and toil— -we find 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 


67 


among the barbarians of the fifth and sixth centuries 
marked differences between the independence of the 
chiefs and that of the common clansmen. But the differ- 
ence does not assume Homeric proportions until the 
barbarian conquerors have settled down, and the comitatus 
or gefolge of the chief changes into the retainers of a 
feudal lord, while the body of clansmen sink into villagers 
over whose common lands the seigneur alternately extends 
his protection and his domain. Then a striking contrast 
to the social life of Athens and Borne begins to disclose 
itself. Instead of the life and the ideas of the city, we 
find men passing their days in isolated groups under the 
shadow of the seigneur’s castle, serfs dependent on a 
master whom there is no public opinion and little public 
force to keep in check, serfs who hardly know of any world 
beyond their village and their lord’s retainers, and who 
bear in ruined harvests or devastated homes the marks of 
that knightly independence to which Europe for a season 
offered a romantic field for individual caprice or chivalry. 
In such ages literature had no resting-place save in the 
lord’s hall or in the monk’s cell; and it is not surprising that 
some centuries of this feudal individualism did much to 
destroy recollections of the clan and its social character. 
In such ages the very notion of “the people” — that 
abstraction which the social conditions of our modern life 
have made so significant — did not exist ; for the isolated 
groups of villagers had, until the rise of towns, no bond 
of social communion save through their lords. Hence, 
in feudal, as in Homeric, literature, personal character, 
aggressive and isolating, overshadows all corporate bonds 
of social unity. To create such bonds was the work of 
new groups whose rise in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, 
England, makes the most memorable chapters of modem 
social history. With the rise of the modem towns — so 


68 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


different at once from the early clan communities and 
from the municipal systems of Greece and Rome — began 
a twofold process; the subordination of individual to 
collective interests accompanied by a development of 
individual liberty within limits prescribed by law. It is 
in the earlier growth of this town life, when feudal 
enemies kept the commune and its corporate interests 
uppermost in the burghers’ minds, that we find the social 
source of likeness between the early dramas of Athens 
and modern Europe. How much of this resemblance was 
due to survivals from the clan age in Athens and 
medieval Europe we need not now inquire. It is enough 
to observe how great must be our difficulties in tracing 
the evolution of personal out of impersonal character 
when Homeric bards, feudal trouveres and troubadours, 
or monks deeply imbued with the universal humanity 
of a world-religion and the personal ideas of Christianity, 
were in the course of social progress our early makers, 
and witnesses to the making, of literature. 

But there is another cause of our difficulties in realis- 
ing the evolution of individual character. Living in com- 
munities highly individualised, which have derived so 
much of their art from Athens and Rome — communities 
themselves highly individualised — adult ideas of person- 
ality have long formed for us the centre of all our creative 
art, of all our criticism. The corporate life of men in 
groups has only found admittance in our modern literatures 
since industrial development began to create a new social 
and impersonal spirit. Marks of this corporate life on 
creative art we may, for example, discover in Faust , with 
its allegorical personages recalling the medieval mystery, 
in the Legende des Siecles , with its vision of the social 
changes through which humanity has passed, or in the 
poems of Walt Whitman, in which, as it has been well 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. G9 

said, each individual suggests a group, each group a 
multitude, and the poet manifests a recurring tendency 
to become a catalogue-maker of persons and things. The 
impersonal laws of science have also contributed to aid 
the corporate spirit of our industrial life and modern 
democracy in producing a creative art of corresponding 
nature ; witness the reign of law, physical and social, in 
the works of many contemporary makers of literature, 
whose feelings of personality sometimes seem to die within 
them at the vast vision of social and physical causes and 
effects — 

“ On n’est plus qu’une ombre qui passe, 

Une &me dans 1’immensite.” 

But such conceptions are of comparatively recent 
origin. Corporate life had little place in the master- 
pieces of earlier European poetry — little in the song of 
Dante full of the note of Italian individualism, more 
perhaps in the character-types and allegories of Chaucer, 
but little in the drama of Shakspere in which the “ people,” 
seldom noticed, appear only as a fickle and irrational mob, 
now huzzaing for Cade and now for the King, now siding 
with Brutus and now with Antony. Nor need we feel 
any surprise at this predominance of the individual in 
modern European literature till the middle of the last 
century. “ The people ” at the time when Shakspere 
wrote was scarcely in existence in England, or France, 
or Germany ; towns there were, indeed, with their local 
patriotism, their parochial politics, their hostility to the 
seigneurs and to each other ; but “ the people,” in the 
sense familiar to our modern industrial communities, in 
which the steam-engine and the telegraph have done so 
much to destroy local distinctions, was then and for a 
long time afterwards, in Mr. Dowden’s excellent phrase, 
like Milton’s half-created animals, still pawing to get 


70 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


free its hinder parts from the mire. * Hence the 
progress of literary art under the patronage of courts, as 
previously under that of seigneurs, moved in a groove of 
individual thought and feeling to which the influence of 
classical imitation only confined it more strictly. Hence, 
too, the language of criticism which expressed or analysed 
this literary progress was altogether conceived from the 
individual standpoint, and can with difficulty be employed 
by the socialising spirit of the present day. To take 
one example of the influence of these individual associa- 
tions, we may refer to the unfinished essay of Montesquieu 
on Taste. In his famous Spirit of the Laics, Montesquieu, 
after starting, indeed, with abstract principles not much 
superior to the usual imitations of Plato and Aristotle, 
had struck into the true path of social and physical 
causation ; yet, when he afterwards came to discuss the 
theory of Taste, there rose before his mind the figure of 
an individual, dependent indeed for his conceptions of 
the beautiful on his senses and liable to have such 
conceptions altered by the sharpening or blunting of his 
senses, the increase or diminution of their number, but 
still an individual with whose statical nature questions of 
aesthetic development as depending on social life or 
physical environment have little to do. So hard was it 
even for such an intellect as that of Montesquieu to rise 
above ideas of individuality which the art and criticism 
of classical antiquity and modern civilization had com- 
bined to create. 

§ 20. Anticipating evidences to be adduced elsewhere, 
w r e may here lay down the principle that in the move- 
ment of civilisation — a movement by no means regular, 
but often spasmodic, back and forward, forward and back, 
though on the whole forward — personal character comes 
* Shali&pere : Ins Mind and Art , p. 320. 


THE PRINCIPLE OF LITERARY GROWTH. 71 

to stand out more and more distinctly from the general 
crowd. But this evolution of personal character — under 
which we include the actions, instincts, emotions, reason, 
imagination of the individual unit — must not be viewed 
apart from the extent to which it prevails, that is, the 
number of units in any social group who may be regarded 
as having attained a given standard of such evolution. 
The highest evolution of character is where every in- 
dividual in the entire group stands out in clear-cut 
personality — it cannot be found in a sprinkling of in- 
dividuals, as in the priestly culture of the East, nor in 
an educated few supported by masses of slaves, as in 
Athens and Borne, nor in a few seigneurs towering like 
their castles among herds of serfs, nor in the poets and 
orators of European courts. To use a phrase of logic, 
we must not only regard the comprehension but also the 
extension of individuality ; and only as both of these go 
hand in hand can we say that permanent personal progress 
is being made. Walt Whitman, whose three leading 
ideas are clearly democracy, American nationality, and 
personality, seems to keenly appreciate this truth. The 
American bard, who will content himself with “ no class 
of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of interests,” 
sees “ eternity in men and women — he does not see men 
or women as dreams or dots.” * How immense is the 
difference between this conception of a multitudinous 
people composed of perfectly distinct personalities, and 
the little groups of common kinship in which personality 
was almost unknown ! How vast and intricate this two- 
fold process of individuality deepening in the separate 
units while expanding in the number of units it includes ! 
Now, it is this twofold process which we mean by “ the 
principle of literary growth.” Only when depth and 

# Preface to Leaves of Grass. 


72 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


extent of individuality are concurrently developed can 
we feel confidence in the permanence of such growth; 
witness the rapid withering of Athenian literature. In a 
well-known canon Sir Henry Maine has expressed one 
aspect of this individual evolution when he says that 
the movement of progressive societies has been from 
status to contract, or, to translate the legal into everyday 
language, from the restraints of the communal group 
to personal freedom of action and thought. But the 
extent to which this free individuality prevails is an 
aspect of such evolution no less important than its degree 
or depth. If any one doubts this, let him remember 
that average character, on which the reasoning of socio- 
logical science is based, means simply the extent to 
which any given individuality prevails. 

We accept, then, as the principle of literary growth, 
the progressive deepening and widening of personality. 
We shall find in the course of our inquiries that not 
only have the depth and extent of personality varied in 
different conditions of social life to an astonishing degree, 
not only have they left upon diverse literatures the most 
diverse marks, but that the animal and physical worlds 
have assumed new aspects under new phases of personal 
being. At present, however, we turn to a question which 
more immediately concerns us, viz. : What is the method 
by which the discovery and illustration of our principle 
may be best conducted ? 


CHAPTER IV. 


TIIE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE. 

§ 21. The comparative method of acquiring or communi- 
cating knowledge is in one sense as old as thought itself, 
in another the peculiar glory of our nineteenth century. 
All reason, all imagination, operate subjectively, and pass 
from man to man objectively, by aid of comparisons and 
differences. The most colourless proposition of the logi- 
cian is either the assertion of a comparison, A is B, or 
the denial of a comparison, A is not B ; and any student 
of Greek thought will remember how the confusion 
of this simple process by mistakes about the nature of 
the copula (i<rn) produced a flood of so-called “ essences ” 
(ova lai) which have done more to mislead both ancient and 
modern philosophy than can be easily estimated. But 
not only the colourless propositions of logic, even the 
highest and most brilliant flights of oratorical eloquence 
or poetic fancy are sustained by this rudimentary struc- 
ture of comparison and difference, this primary scaffold- 
ing, as we may call it, of human thought. If sober 
experience works out scientific truths in propositions 
affirming or denying comparison, imagination even in 
the richest colours works under the same elementary 
forms. Athenian intellect and Alexandrian reflection 
failed to perceive this fundamental truth, and the failure 


74 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


is attributable in the main to certain social character- 
istics of the Greeks. Groups, like individuals, need to 
project themselves beyond the circle of their own associa- 
tions if they wish to understand their own nature; but 
the great highway which has since led to comparative 
philosophy was closed against the Greek by his contempt 
for any language but his own. At the same time, his 
comparisons of his own social life, in widely different 
stages, were narrowed partially by want of monuments 
of his past, much more by contempt for the less civilised 
Greeks, such as the Macedonians, and especially by a 
mass of myth long too sacred to be touched by science, 
and then too tangled to be profitably loosed by the hands 
of impatient sceptics. Thus, deprived of the historical 
study of their own past and circumscribed within the 
comparisons and distinctions their own adult language 
permitted, it is not surprising that the Greeks made poor 
progress in comparative thinking, as a matter not merely 
of unconscious action but of conscious reflection. This 
conscious reflection has been the growth of European 
thought during the past five centuries, at first indeed a 
weakling, but, from causes of recent origin, now flourish- 
ing in healthy vigour. 

When Dante wrote De Eloquio Vulgari he marked 
the starting-point of our modern comparative science — 
the nature of language, a problem not to be lightly 
overlooked by the peoples of modern Europe inheriting, 
unlike Greek or Hebrew, a literature written in a tongue 
whose decomposition had plainly gone to make up the 
elements of their own living speech. The Latin, followed 
at an interval by the Greek, Renaissance laid the founda- 
tions of comparative reflection in the mind of modern 
Europe. Meanwhile the rise of European nationalities 
was creating new standpoints, new materials, for com- 


THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE. 75 

parison in modern institutions and modes of thought or 
sentiment. The discovery of the New World brought 
this new European civilisation face to face with primi- 
tive life, and awakened men to contrasts with their 
own associations more striking than Byzantine or even 
Saracen could offer. Commerce, too, was now bringing 
the rising nations of Europe into rivalry with, and know- 
ledge of, each other, and, more than this, giving a greater 
degree of personal freedom to the townsmen of the West 
than they had ever possessed before. Accompanying 
the increase of wealth and freedom came an awakening 
of individual opinion among men, even an uprising of it 
against authority which has since been called the 
.Reformation, but an uprising which, in days of feudal, 
monarchical, and “ popular ” conflict, in days when edu- 
cation was the expensive luxury of the few, and even the 
communication of work-a-day ideas was as slow and 
irregular as bad roads and worse banditti could make it, 
was easily checked even in countries where it was sup- 
posed to have done great things. Individual inquiry, 
and with it comparative thinking, checked within the 
domain of social life by constant collisions with theo- 
logical dogma, turned to the material world, began to 
build up the vast stores of modern material knowledge, 
and only in later days of freedom began to construct from 
this physical side secular views of human origin and 
destiny which on the social side had been previously 
curbed by dogma. Meanwhile European knowledge of 
man’s social life in its myriad varieties was attaining pro- 
portions such as neither Bacon nor Locke had contem- 
plated. Christian missionaries were bringing home the 
life and literature of China so vividly to Europeans that 
neither the art nor the scepticism of Voltaire disdained 
to borrow from the Jesuit Premare’s translation of a 


76 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Chinese drama published in 1735. Then Englishmen 
in India learned of that ancient language which Sir 
William Jones, toward the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, introduced to European scholars ; and soon the 
points of resemblance between this language and the 
languages of Greeks and Italians, Teutons and Celts, 
were observed, and used like so many stepping-stones 
upon which men passed in imagination over the flood of 
time which separates the old Aryans from their modern 
offshoots in the West. Since those days the method of 
comparison has been applied to many subjects besides 
language ; and many new influences have combined to 
make the mind of Europe more ready to compare and 
to contrast than it ever was before. The steam-engine, 
telegraph, daily press, now bring the local and central, 
the popular and the cultured, life of each European 
country and the general actions of the entire world face 
to face ; and habits of comparison have arisen such as 
never before prevailed so widely and so vigorously. But, 
while we may call consciously comparative thinking the 
great glory of our nineteenth century, let us not forget 
that such thinking is largely due to mechanical improve- 
ments, and that long before our comparative philologists, 
jurists, economists, and the rest, scholars like Reuchlin 
used the same method less consciously, less accurately, 
yet in a manner from the first foreshadowing a vast out- 
look instead of the exclusive views of Greek criticism. 
Here, then, is a rapid sketch of comparative thought in 
its European history. How is such thought, how is its 
method, connected with our subject, “Literature”? 

§ 22. It has been observed that imagination no less 
than experience works through the medium of compari- 
sons ; but it is too often forgotten that the range of these 
comparisons is far from being unlimited in space and 


THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE. 77 

time, in social life and physical environment. If scien- 
tific imagination, such as Professor Tyndall once ex- 
plained and illustrated, is strictly bound by the laws of 
hypothesis, the magic of the literary artist which looks 
so free is as strictly bound within the range of ideas 
already marked out by the language of his group. 
Unlike the man of science, the man of literature cannot 
coin words for a currency of new ideas ; for his verse or 
prose, unlike the discoveries of the man of science, must 
reach average, not specialised, intelligence. Words must 
pass from special into general use before they can be 
used by him ; and, just in proportion as special kinds 
of knowledge (legal, commercial, mechanical, and the 
like) are developed, the more striking is the difference 
between the language of literature and that of science 
the language and ideas of the community contrasted 
with those of its specialised parts. If we trace the rise 
of any civilised community out of isolated clans or 
tribes, we may observe a twofold development closely 
connected with the language and ideas of literature — 
expansion of the group outwards, a process attended by 
expansions of thought and sentiment; and specialisation 
of activities within, a process upon which depends the 
rise of a leisure-enjoying literary class, priestly or secular. 
The latter is the process familiar to economists as divi- 
sion of labour, the former that familiar to antiquaries as 
the fusion of smaller into larger social groups. While 
the range of comparison widens from clan to national and 
even world- wide associations and sympathies, the special- 
ising process separates ideas, words, and forms of writing 
from the proper domain of literature. Thus, in the 
Homeric age the speech in the Agora has nothing pro- 
fessional or specialised about it, and is a proper subject 
of poetry ; but in the days of professional Athenian 


78 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


oratory the speech is out of keeping with the drama, 
and smacks too much of the rhetor’s school. Arabic 
poets of the “Ignorance” sing of their clan life ; Spenser 
glows with warmly national feelings ; Goethe and Victor 
Hugo rise above thoughts of even national destiny. It 
is due to these two processes of expansion and speciali- 
sation that the language and ideas of literature gradually 
shade off from the special language and special ideas of 
certain classes in any highly developed community, and 
literature comes to differ from science not only by its 
imaginative character, but by the fact that its language 
and ideas belong to no special class. In fact, whenever 
literary language and ideas cease to be in a manner 
common property, literature tends either towards imita- 
tion work or to become specialised, to become science in a 
literary dress — as not a little of our metaphysical poetry 
has been of late. Such facts as these bring out promi- 
nently the relation of comparative thinking and of the 
comparative method to literature. Is the circle of com- 
mon speech and thought, the circle of the group’s com- 
parative thinking, as narrow as a tribal league ? Or, 
have many such circles combined into a national group? 
Are the offices of priest and singer still combined in a 
kind of magic ritual? Or, have professions and trades 
been developed, each, so to speak, with its own technical 
dialect for practical purposes ? Then we must remember 
that these external and internal evolutions of social life, 
take place often unconsciously, making comparisons and 
distinctions without reflecting on their nature or limits ; 
we must remember that it is the business of reflective 
comparison, of the comparative method, to retrace this 
development consciously, and to seek the causes which 
have produced it. Let us now look at the literary use of 
such comparison in a less abstract, a more lifelike form. 


THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE. 79 

When Mr. Matthew Arnold defines the function of 
criticism as “ a disinterested endeavour to learn and 
propagate the best that is known and thought in the 
world/’ he is careful to add that much of this best know- 
ledge and thought is not of English but foreign growth. 
The English critic in these times of international litera- 
ture must deal largely with foreign fruit and flower, and 
thorn-pieces sometimes. He cannot rest content with the 
products of his own country’s culture, though they may 
vary from the wild fruits of the Saxon wilderness to the 
rude plenty of the Elizabethan age, from the courtly 
neatness of Pope to the democratic tastes of to-day. M. 
Demogeot has lately published an interesting study * of 
the influences exerted by Italy, Spain, England, and 
Germany on the literature of France; our English critic 
must do likewise for the literature of his own country. 
At every stage in the progress of his country’s literature 
he is, in fact, forced to look more or less beyond her sea- 
washed shores. Does he accompany Chaucer on his pil- 
grimage and listen to the pilgrims’ tales ? The scents 
of the lands of the South fill the atmosphere of the 
Tabard Inn, and on the road to Canterbury waft him in 
thought to the Italy of Dante and of Petrarch and 
Boccaccio. Does he watch the hardy crews of Drake and 
Frobisher unload in English port the wealth of Spanish 
prize, and listen to the talk of great sea-captains full of 
phrases learned from the gallant subjects of Philip II. ? 
The Spain of Cervantes and Lope de Vega rises before 
his eyes, and the new physical and mental wealth of 
Elizabethan England bears him on the wings of commerce 
or of fancy to the noisy port of Cadiz and the palaces of 
Spanish grandees. Through the narrow and dirty streets 
of Elizabethan London fine gentlemen, with Spanish 

* Hisloire des Litteratures Strangeres (Paris, 1880). 


80 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


rapiers at their sides and Spanish phrases in their mouths, 
pass to and fro in the dress admired by Spanish taste. 
The rude theatres resound with Spanish aliusions. And, 
were it not for the deadly strife of Englishman and 
Spaniard on the seas, and the English dread of Spain as 
the champion of Papal interference, England’s Helicon 
might forget the setting sun of the Italian republics to 
enjoy the full sunshine of Spanish influences. But now 
our critic stands in the Whitehall of Charles II., or 
lounges at Will’s Coffee-House, or enters the theatres 
whose recent restoration cuts to the heart his Puritan 
friends. Everywhere it is the same. Spanish phrases 
and manners have been forgotten. At the court, Buck- 
ingham and the rest perfume their licentious wit with 
French bouquet. At Will’s, Dry den glorifies the rimed 
tragedies of Bacine ; and theatres, gaudy with scenic 
contrivances unknown to Shakspere, are filled with 
audiences who in the intervals chatter French criti- 
cism, and applaud with equal fervour outrageous indecen- 
cies and formal symmetry. Soon the English Boileau 
will carry the culture of French exotics as far as the 
English hothouse will allow ; soon that scepticism which 
the refined immorality of the court, the judges, and the 
Parliament renders fashionable among the few who as 
yet guide the destinies of the English nation, shall 
pass from Bolingbroke to Voltaire, and from Voltaire to 
the Revolutionists. We need not accompany our critic 
to Weimar, nor seek with him some sources of German 
influence on England in English antipathies to France 
and her revolution. He has proved that the history 
of our country’s literature cannot be explained by 
English causes alone, any more than the origin of the 
English language or people can be so explained. He has 
proved that each national literature is a centre towards 


THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE 81 


which not only national but also international forces 
gravitate. We thank him for this glimpse of a growth 
so wide, so varying, so full of intricate interaction ; it is 
an aspect of literature studied comparatively, but, in 
spite of its apparent width, it is only one aspect. 
National literature has been developed from within as 
well as influenced from without ; and the comparative 
study of this internal development is of far greater 
interest than that of the external, because the former is 
less a matter of imitation and more an evolution directly 
dependent on social and physical causes. 

§ 23. To the internal sources of national develop- 
ment, social or physical, and the effect of different phases 
of this development on literature, the student will there- 
fore turn as the true field of scientific study. He will 
watch the expansion of social life from narrow circles of 
clans or tribal communities, possessed of such sentiments 
and thoughts as could live within such narrow spheres, 
and expressing in their rude poetry their intense feel- 
ings of brotherhood, their weak conceptions of person- 
ality. He will watch the deepening of personal senti- 
ments in the isolated life of feudalism which ousts the 
communism of the clan, the reflection of such sentiments 
in songs of personal heroism, and the new aspects which 
the life of man, and of nature, and of animals — the horse, 
the hound, the hawk in feudal poetry, for example — 
assumes under this change in social organisation. Then 
he will mark the beginnings of a new kind of corporate 
life in the cities, in whose streets sentiments of clan 
exclusiveness are to perish, the prodigious importance of 
feudal personality is to disappear, new forms of indi- 
vidual and collective character are to make their appear- 
ance, and the drama is to take the place of the early 
communal chant or the song of the chieftain’s hall. 


82 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Next, the scene will change into the courts of monarchy. 
Here the feelings of the cities and of the seigneurs are 
being focussed ; here the imitation of classical models 
supplements the influences of growing national union ; 
here literature, reflecting a more expanded society, a 
deeper sense of individuality, than it ever did before, 
produces its master-pieces under the patronage of an 
Elizabeth or a Louis Quatorze. Nor, in observing such 
effects of social evolution on literature, will the student 
by any means confine his view to this or that country. 
He will find that if England had her clan age, so also had 
Europe in general ; that if F ranee had her feudal poetry, 
so also had Germany, and Spain, and England ; that 
though the rise of the towns affected literature in diverse 
ways throughout Europe, yet there are general features 
common to their influences ; and that the same may be 
said of centralism in our European nations. Trace the 
influence of the Christian pulpit, or that of judicial insti- 
tutions, or that of the popular assembly, on the growth 
of prose in different European countries, and you soon 
find how similarly internal social evolution has reflected 
itself in the word and thought of literature ; how essen- 
tial it is that any accurate study of literature should pass 
from language into the causes which allowed language 
and thought to reach conditions capable of supporting a 
literature ; and how profoundly this study must be one 
of comparison and contrast. But we must not underrate 
our difficulties in tracing the effects of such internal 
evolution on a people’s verse and prose. We must rather 
admit at the outset that such evolution is liable to be 
obscured or altogether concealed by the imitation ot 
foreign models. To an example of such imitation we 
shall now turn. 

The cases of Rome and Russia are enough to prove 


THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND LITERATURE. 83 

that external influences, carried beyond a certain point, 
may convert literature from the outgrowth of the group 
to which it belongs into a mere exotic, deserving of 
scientific study only as an artificial production indirectly 
dependent on social life. Let an instrument of speech 
be formed, a social centre established, an opportunity for 
the rise of a literary class able to depend upon its handi- 
work be given, and only a strong current of national 
ideas, or absolute ignorance of foreign and ancient models, 
can prevent the production of imitative work whose 
materials and arrangement, no matter how unlike those 
characteristic of the group, may be borrowed from climates 
the most diverse, social conditions the most opposite, and 
conceptions of personal character belonging to totally 
different epochs. Especially likely is something of this 
kind to occur when the cultured few of a people com- 
paratively uncivilised become acquainted with the literary 
models of men who have already passed through many 
grades of civilisation, and who can, as it seems, save them 
the time and trouble of nationally repeating the same 
laborious ascent. The imitative literature of Rome is 
a familiar example of such borrowing ; and that of 
Russia looked for a time as if it were fated to follow 
French models almost as closely as Rome once followed 
the Greek. How certain this imitation of French models 
was to conceal the true national spirit of Russian life, to 
throw a veil of contemptuous ignorance over her barbarous 
past, and to displace in her literature the development 
of the nation by the caprice of a Russo-Gallic clique, 
none can fail to perceive. In a country whose social life 
was, and is, so largely based on the communal organisa- 
tion of the Mir , or village community, the strongly-indi- 
vidualised literature of France became such a favourite 
source of imitation as to throw into the background 


84 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


altogether those folk-songs which the reviving spirit of 
national literature in Russia, and that of social study in 
Europe generally, are at length beginning to examine. 
This Russian imitation of France may be illustrated by 
the works of Prince Kantemir (1709-1743), who has been 
called “ the first writer of Russia,” the friend of Montes- 
quieu, and the imitator of Boileau and Horace in his 
epistles and satires; by those of Lomonossoff (1711-1765), 
“ the first classical writer of Russia,” the pupil of Wolf, 
the founder of the University of Moscow, the reformer 
of the Russian language, who by academical Panegyrics 
on Peter the Great and Elizabeth sought to supply the 
want of that truly oratorical prose which only free 
assemblies can foster, attempted an epic Petreid in honour 
of the great Tsar, and modelled his odes on the French 
lyric poets and Pindar ; * or by those of Soumarokoff, 
who, for the theatre of St. Petersburg established by 
Elizabeth, adapted or translated Corneille, Racine, 
Voltaire, much as Plautus and Terence had introduced 
the Athenian drama at Rome. As in Rome there had 
set in a conflict between old Roman family sentiments 
and the individualising spirit of the Greeks, as in Rome 
nobles of light and leading had been delighted to 
exchange archaic sentiments of family life and archaic 
measures like the Saturnian for the cultured thought and 
harmonious metres of Greece, so in Russia there set in 
a conflict between French individualism, dear to the 
court and nobles, and the social feelings of the Russian 
commune and family. The most ancient monuments of 
Russian thought — the Chronicle of the monk Nestor 
(1056-1116) and the So?ig of Igor — were as unlikely to 

* The son of the fisherman of Archangel did much, no doubt, to create 
national literature, especially by his severance of the old Slavon of tho 
Church from the spoken language ; hut his works contain evidences of 
French influence in spite of his national predilections. 


THE COMPARATIVE.. METHOD AND LITERATURE. 85 

attract the attention of such imitators as the Builinas 
and the folk-songs ; and among a people who had never 
experienced the Western feudalism with its chivalrous 
poetry, to whom the Renaissance and Reformation had 
been unknown, came an imitation of Western progress 
which threatened for a time to prove as fatal to national 
literature as the imitation of Greek ideas had proved in 
Rome. In this European China, as Russia, with her 
family sentiments and filial devotion to the Tsar, has 
been called, French, and afterwards German and English, 
influences clearly illustrate the difficulties to which a 
scientific student of literature is exposed by imitative 
work out of keeping with social life ; but the growing 
triumph of Russian national life as the true spring of 
Russian literature marks the want of real vitality in any 
literature dependent upon such foreign imitation. 

§ 24. These internal and external aspects of literary 
growth are thus objects of comparative inquiry, because 
literatures are not Aladdin’s palaces raised by unseen 
hands in the twinkling of an eye, but the substantial 
results of causes which can be specified and described. 
The theory that literature is the detached life-work of 
individuals who are to be worshipped like images fallen 
down from heaven, not known as workers in the language 
and ideas of their age and place, and the kindred theory 
that imagination transcends the associations of space and 
time, have done much to conceal the relation of science 
to literature and to injure the works of both. But the 
“ great-man theory ” is really suicidal ; for, while break- 
ing up history and literature into biographies and thus 
preventing the recognition of any lines of orderly develop- 
ment, it would logically reduce not only what is known 
as “ exceptional genius,” but all men and women, so far 
as they possess personality at all, to the unknown, the 


86 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


causeless — in fact, would issue in a sheer denial of human 
knowledge, limited or unlimited. On the other hand, 
the theory that imagination works out of space and time 
(Coleridge, for example, telling us that “ Shakspere is 
as much out of time as Spenser out of space ”) must not 
be repelled by any equally dogmatic assertion that it is 
limited by human experience, but is only to be refuted 
or established by such comparative studies as those on 
which we are about to enter. 

The central point of these studies is the relation of 
the individual to the group. In the orderly changes 
through which this relation has passed, as revealed by 
the comparison of literatures belonging to different social 
states, we find our main reasons for treating literature as 
capable of scientific explanation. There are, indeed, 
other standpoints, profoundly interesting, from which the 
art and criticism of literature may also be explained — 
that of physical nature, that of animal life. But from 
these alone we shall not see far into the secrets of literary 
workmanship. We therefore adopt, with a modification 
hereafter to be noticed, the gradual expansion of social 
life, from clan to city, from city to nation, from both of 
these to cosmopolitan humanity, as the proper order of 
our studies in comparative literature. 


BOOK II. 


CLAN LITERATURE. 





r 



CHAPTER I. 


THE CLAN GROUP. 


§ 25. Chateaubriand, in a remarkable chapter of Le 
Genie du Christianisme , maintains that “ unbelief is the 
principal cause of the decadence of taste and genius. 
When people believed nothing at Athens and Rome, 
talents disappeared with the gods, and the Muses gave 
up to barbarism those who had ceased to have faith in 
them.” If w r e put the word “ sympathy ” where Chateau- 
briand would have used “ belief,” and maintain that the 
decay of sympathy between man and man is one cause 
of the decay of literature, just as its deepening and ex- 
pansion immensely contribute to literary progress, we 
shall exchange a vague theory of dogma for a fact which 
the social history of the world abundantly illustrates. 
The prospect of being heard with sympathy or indiffer- 
ence must profoundly affect the makers of verse or prose, 
the literary artist and even the scientific inquirer ; and 
it would be an interesting question to ask whether the 
supposed decay of imagination in civilised progress (a 
favourite theory with Macaulay) does not mark that 
temporary break-up of sympathy which constantly accom- 
panies the transition from one social stage to another. 
Whatever pleasure the scientist may derive from his 
solitary study — and even this generally finds its source 


90 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


in some prospective audience for his achievements — there 
can be no doubt that literature, whether its form be verse 
or prose, whether its spirit be intensely individual or 
social, cannot live apart from some kind of sympathetic 
group. Hence the gradual extension of social sympathy 
is a leading feature of literary development. Sensations 
and emotions, moral and intellectual ideas, widen in their 
range as smaller groups merge into larger ; and this pro- 
gressive merger underlies the development of institutions 
and language, and is largely a maker of myth, the 
interlacing of group traditions (easily illustrated by early 
Arab history) creating eponymous myths of every variety. 

But it is not to be supposed that the social groups, or 
their progressive merger into widening circles, admit of 
exact definition. We cannot select any exact point and 
say, “Here the clan breaks up and the city succeeds.” 
We cannot deny the existence of clan associations in 
days when the leading features of clan life have been 
obliterated — nay, it is often only because such survivals 
have taken place, owing to the progress of different parts 
of society at different rates, that we can recover the past 
at all. We can draw no hard-and-fast lines limiting the 
idea of “ clan ” absolutely, or denying its concrete exist- 
ence save where our ideal definition is exactly realised. 
And the reason of this apparent vagueness is the best of 
all possible reasons — viz., the absence of any such definite 
lines in social phenomena not abstractly sketched on 
paper, but as living and moving realities. The jurist 
does not attempt to minutely define the Homan familia, 
or give the exact dates at which the marked features of 
that social unit faded away. The economist, with all 
his masses of statistical information, cannot distinguish 
his capitalist and labouring groups save by broad dis- 
tinctions which in concrete life insensibly fade into each 


THE CLAN GROUP. 


91 


other; nor would he fix the decade in which English 
landlords, or capitalists, or labourers became sufficiently 
free from medieval restraints to allow his ideal groups 
some semblance of truth. In fine, no competent judge 
will deny that these and all social scientists must ideally 
construct definitions which concrete facts only tem- 
porarily and indistinctly contain — unless, indeed, we are 
content to look in despair on that vast moving mass 
which we call “ social life ” and give up the attempt to 
understand and explain it altogether. The search after 
minute distinctions in social classification and minute 
time-marks in social evolution is in fact an eidolon tribus. 
An image of the individual’s life is insensibly transferred 
to the action of men in groups, and the distinctness ot' 
an individual’s personality and career is required from 
social classifications the very essence of which is their 
immunity from that defined birth and death which give 
to individual life its clear-cut limits. The concrete 
existence of the individual in space is, likewise, sought 
in group life, and we perpetually forget that, even in 
the simplest cases, a group is essentially an abstraction 
drawing up an immense detail of individualities into an 
apex of common points which are found in actual life 
diverging into many degrees of diversity. While we 
thus erroneously seek the unity and personality of the 
individual in groups, the common standards of chrono- 
logy are likewise applied by universal consent to the 
life of groups as to that of individuals. Let the first 
year of our social memory be once settled, and, whether 
it be an Egyptian dynasty or the first celebration of public 
games, or the birth or the death or the flight of a prophet, 
we are ready to measure back by year and day to this 
arbitrary terminus the lives of individuals and of groups 
alike. The observer of organic nature knows by what 


92 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


insensible grades the individuals of his various classes, 
plants or animals, fade into each other, yet his distinc- 
tions, however faint at the outline, are clear enough in 
the colour. So, too, the observer of inorganic nature 
must assume the lines which nature does not draw. 
Least of all should the observer of social life expect 
minute exactness in those abstract classifications by 
which he attempts to overcome difficulties peculiarly 
great in his subject — to stop ideally the constant motion 
of social life in a kind of instantaneous photograph of its 
facts, and then to offer an explanation of these facts and 
a series of pictures detailing social life in progress and 
explaining its complicated motion. In nature, as A. W. 
Schlegel has pointedly remarked, the boundaries of 
objects run into one another ; surely it will not be sup- 
posed that any magic of science can banish this natural 
indistinctness of outline ? 

§ 26. When, therefore, we say that the "clan” is a 
social classification, we need not be ashamed to admit the 
ideal character of our abstract term, or our inability to 
state precisely the points at which its communal career 
begins and ends. But we must know the leading facts 
which this abstract term idealises, the wide domain of 
human history which clan life has dominated, the signi- 
ficant truth that this form of social organisation, under 
a great variety of names and a considerable variety of 
features, is the most archaic to which historical science 
enables us to ascend with confidence. We shall, there- 
fore, explain our ideal of clan life and the nature of the 
archaic universality it claims so far as anything human 
can claim that proud title. But first we have something 
to say about the practical and theoretic conditions which 
have turned men’s attention to the clan organisation. 

The importance which the clan has assumed in recent 


THE CLAN GROUP. 


93 


speculation is due to a variety of associations, partly in- 
cidental to the ordinary activities of our nineteenth-cen- 
tury life, partly peculiar to the character of our modern 
thought. The everyday life of Europe in general and 
of England in particular is now habituated to social 
contrasts greater than ever before fell within the positive 
range of human knowledge. While civilised nations 
stand face to face by aid of press, telegraph, steam- 
engine, their differences, once thought so considerable, 
have almost ceased to attract attention compared with 
the countless grades of Eastern and Western barbarism 
which adventure, commerce, or missionary zeal have 
brought home to us as living realities. At the same 
time, the historical faculty, in which Macaulay rightly 
places the great superiority of modern over ancient 
culture, enlarged by new ranges of comparison and con- 
trast, has since the Renaissance and Reformation cast off 
the shackles which impeded its freedom in Athens and 
Rome. The overweening contempt for foreigners, which 
in the Greek and his imitative -conqueror despised the 
lights of comparative inquiry lying all round their 
march of conquest, was impossible among the variety 
of nationalities and languages which rose out of the ruins 
of the Roman empire. The recovery of Greek literature, 
even while it diverted national literatures into imitations 
of itself, fostered this growth of conscious comparison. 
And, after the individual had dared to question the 
authority of creed with a freedom which Greece and 
Rome ventured to apply to their myths only when their 
vitality had perished, the fruits of historical criticism 
(untimely in the sneering nihilism of Voltaire and 
Gibbon) needed little but improved knowledge of India 
and the East in general to ripen into an abundant 
harvest. It is this harvest which the nineteenth century 


94 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


now reaps in language, in law, in political economy ; in 
fine, in the most accurate and most extended knowledge 
of history which the world has ever known. Science, like 
a hundred-1] anded Briareus, working in many a field, yet 
watching with the eyes of an Argus all the richly varied 
ingathering, has learned how to probe among the very 
roots of social thought, and speech, and action. The 
hands of the mighty Titan have found the clan ideas, 
the clan facts, at the roots of property and political 
institutions, of legal rights, religious doctrines, and moral 
principles. Are we not justified in the belief that we 
shall find them also at the roots of literature ? 

What is a “ clan ” ? As already observed, we are not 
to suppose that all clans are exactly alike. Trades- 
unions and co-operative associations are called by their 
respective common names, yet even with our abundant 
means of contemporary information we are content to 
merge individual differences in our general notions of the 
one and the other. The ancient clan groups — not a whit 
the less ancient because they coexist with the most ad- 
vanced civilisation as at the present day — differ widely 
from trades-unions and co-operative societies in being 
for the most part of natural, not artificial, growth. They 
are groups not made with hands, not planned with a set 
purpose, not supplied with defined rules which can be 
printed and exhibited in the rooms of a club, but intensely 
united by bonds of common thought and feeling com- 
pared with which the deepest sentiments of Christian 
communion can hardly be regarded as other than arti- 
ficial. This bond of unity is common kinship, common 
ancestry. Not realised as an idea of the intellect, not 
reflected upon as an emotion of the heart, but profoundly 
felt to be the centre of social life, this common kinship is 
as real as though it could be touched in the person of 


THE CLAN GROUP. 


95 


that communal ancestor from whose loins the group is 
sprung or thought to be sprung, whose imaginary pres- 
ence sanctifies every festival of common joys, whose 
favour is to be propitiated in every common affliction, 
and to whom, in company with others long since gathered 
to their fathers, it is the destiny of the clansman, sooner or 
later, to return. Unformulated in any doctrine, but not 
on that account less real, unwritten in any code, but not 
on that account less lasting, this unity of blood is the 
central conception of clan life, the central point to and 
from which sets the current of the clansmen’s deepest 
feelings. 

The outward marks of this common kinship are 
numerous. Common religious rites, or sacra gentilicia, 
bind the clansmen in a fellowship of ancestral worship 
and the village community to its eponymous ancestor. 
Reciprocal obligations of defence and vengeance unite 
the brotherhood, whether it consists of Hebrew or Arab 
Semites, of Greek or German Aryans, of kinsmen in 
Central Asia or in the wilds of the New World. Rights 
or obligations of marriage within the clan everywhere 
attest the same communal exclusiveness ; and some forms 
of clan life would even lead us to believe that the 
brotherhood once lived under a common roof, and shared 
not only their sacred festivals but even their ordinary 
meals. Conspicuous, however, among these signs of 
communal kinship is an econ6mic feature of the settled 
clan which living scholars have investigated with equal 
patience and learning — the common ownership of land. 
This feature M. de Laveleye, for example, in his Primi- 
tive Property , and Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Com- 
munities and Early History of Institutions , have illus- 
trated by examples taken from every quarter of the 
globe — from India and Russia, from the Germanic Mark, 


96 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and from the agrarian communities of the Celts and the 
Arabs. No doubt such common ownership of land is not 
always a mark of clanship. No doubt it marks some- 
times the desire to get as much as possible out of the 
soil by a kind of agricultural co-operation. But, allow- 
ing for such economic motives, and admitting the exist- 
ence of village communities, which are signs of economic 
rather than clan organisation, we are amply justified in 
treating common property as an ordinary and prominent 
feature of clan life. 

More interesting, however, than outward signs of 
clan communion is the inward spirit of these commu- 
nities. On this moral side 'the intense social unity of 
the group expresses itself in notions of right and wrong 
which curiously conflict with those of civilised nations. 
Individual responsibility is conceived most obscurely ; 
personal intention, if seen at all, is visible only through 
mists of communal sentiment ; and the corporate respon- 
sibility of the group is vividly realised. Inherited guilt, 
vicarious punishment, the absence of belief in a future 
state of personal reward or retribution — such are some of 
the most interesting signs of this clan spirit. It is easy 
to see how these three characteristics of the clan spirit 
follow with an unconscious logic from corporate responsi- 
bility. The clansman has done wrong, and, until that 
wrong is atoned for, any member of the offending group 
is liable to punishment, a liability nowise altered by the 
birth or death of the individuals composing the group. 
In the eyes of the clan the inheritance of such responsi- 
bility seems not a whit less reasonable than the acquisi- 
tion of rights in the common lands by birth. In the 
eyes of the clan the selection of this or that person for 
punishment seems as reasonable as the escape of others 
by death from the only known sphere of punishment — 


THE CLAN GROUP. 


97 


human clan life. Indeed, this corporate liability for sins 
is the only possible moral sanction so long as the indi- 
vidual's intention is left out of sight, his personal being 
dimly realised, and his personal share in a future life but 
vaguely felt. And so the communal rite3 of burial, 
which form the closing scene in the clansman’s career, are 
but the appropriate dismissal of a comrade to a shadow- 
world in which reward and punishment for things done 
in the light of the sun have no place. 

§ 27. It will be at once observed that such a group 
must have prodigiously influenced the beginnings of 
literature. From it, for example, come the sentiments 
of blood-revenge so common in early Arab and Saxon 
poetry. From it come those feelings of duty to kindred 
which permeate all early poetry, even when it belongs to 
the chiefs hall and gcfolge much more than to clan life. 
But it is not to be supposed that any literature of any 
country or age does, or could, contain an exact reflection 
of clan life in its purity. Such purely communal life is 
clearly impossible save within narrow limits ; and the very 
narrowness of such limits prevents the development of 
action, thought, or language capable of supporting a 
literature. It is true that the wild festivals of Indian 
tribes supplied observers a century ago (such as Dr. 
Brown, whose History of the Rise of Poetry, noticed ap- 
provingly by Percy, deserves more attention than it has 
hitherto received) with curious combinations of dance, 
music, song, and gesticulation, in which, as comparative 
evidences have since proved, they were right in discover- 
ing the primary sources of literature. But until some 
fusion of clans has developed wider sympathies and 
opened the way for religious centralisation with its ritual 
of choral song, until bards who can depend upon their 
art for subsistence have found their patrons in chiefs 


98 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


whom war and property have raised above the group, few 
of the materials requisite for literature can be said to 
exist. When these points of social progress have been 
attained, the development of literature parts into two 
remarkably different directions, which the literature of 
the Hebrews on the one hand, and the early poetry of 
Greece on the other, aptly illustrate. The literature 
of the Hebrew's passed into the hands of a central priest- 
hood; the early poetry of the Greeks is the song of 
bards possessing local independence. The social and 
hereditary spirit of the clan predominates in the former ; 
the individual spirit of the chief lives and moves in the 
latter. There is, no doubt, a strong bond of connection 
between these early forms of literature in the individual 
character which decomposing clan life tends to create — 
a character in which sentiments of devotion to the chief 
supplant the old ties of communal kinship ; and else- 
where we may return to this connection between com- 
munal and feudal life and literature. At present, how- 
ever, we shall devote our main attention to the corporate 
character of clan literature. 


CHAPTEE II. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 

§ 28. From the subordinate position of the commonalty 
(dermis) in the Homeric poems, a position not much 
superior to that of the serfs as compared with the kings 
and chiefs, it might not be supposed that song in Greece, 
as elsewhere, was in its beginnings neither the making of 
royal minstrels like Demodokus, nor the celebration of 
princely heroes like Achilles and Ulysses. But the 
width of sympathy between Greeks of many tribes and 
cities in the Homeric poems, no less than the common 
knowledge they imply of heroic and divine myths, and 
even special tales of epic character,* are enough to prove 
that behind the Iliad and Odyssey existed poetry of local 
sympathies and songs of local sentiment long before the 
genius of one master-bard, or of many, built up the 
Greek epics into the forms in which they have reached 
us. As has frequently been observed, the picture of 
social life in the Homeric poems is that of men who have 
left the barbarous isolation and exclusiveness of clan life 
far behind them ; men who, if they have lost much of the 
clansmen’s equality, are gaining wider sympathies and 

* E.g. the ship Argo is called “interesting to all” (7ra<r<yueA.oy<ra), 
Od ., xii. 70, an epithet implying a familiar story. For further examples, 
see K. O. Muller, Hist, of Gk. Lit (Donaldson’s translation), vol. i. p. 54. 


100 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


artistic refinement under the guidance of chiefs and 
kings. Social life as depicted in the Homeric poems 
bears striking resemblances to that of the medieval 
seigneurs, allowing for great differences wrought among 
the latter by ideas of a world-religion and a world-empire. 
If the medieval priest was the mediator between the 
serfs and God, the Homeric priests are honoured by 
the commonalty (demus) as gods.* If the medieval 
singers wander from seigneur to seigneur, or enjoy their 
permanent patronage, the Homeric bard enjoys like 
patronage or security in his wunderings.f But in all 
this w r e have personal power and personal poetry. We 
have left far behind us the communal life and song of 
the clan ; and we must not suppose, because we have thus 
left these out of sight, that the banquets of the princes 
are the true homes of early song, and that the aoidos or 
the troubadour are the earliest of song-makers. The 
truth is that the sentiment of the lines — 

“Lordship of the many is no good thing, 

One lord let there be, one king to w hom Zeus, 

Son of crafty-counselled Kronos, giveth 
Sceptre and themistes J for his rule ” § — 

is almost equally removed from the spirit of the clan and 
that of the city republic ; and the makers of such lines 
are the poets neither of the commune nor the common- 
wealth. Let us, then, try to discover the character of 
the songs which we believe to be older than those of 
either the cities or the kings. 

Critics of Greek literature have long distinguished 
the lyric poetry of the Dorians, intended to be executed 
by choruses and accompanied by choral dances as well as 
instrumental music, from the iEolian lyric, meant for 

* Od., xiv. 205. t Ibid., xvii. 383 sqq. 

t Inspired decisions. Cf. Maine, Ancient Law , ck. i. 

§ Iliad, ii. 201-206. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


101 


recitation by a single person who accompanied himself 
with some stringed instrument, such as the lyre, and 
with suitable gestures. The former, public and often 
religious in its character, preferred subjects of general 
interest, while the thoughts and feelings of the individual 
were the appropriate themes of the latter. It is true 
that no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between these 
Doric and iEolian lyrics ; we know, for example, that 
Lesbian poems were sometimes composed lor choral 
recitation, such as the humenaios of Sappho imitated by 
Catullus. Still, the general difference between these 
choral and personal lyrics is clear ; and no less clear is 
the difference of social conditions which such lyrics 
respectively reflect. Like the communal institutions of 
the Dorian states, their choral poetry keeps before our 
eyes those groups of kinsmen, with common property and 
feasts, which lie in the prehistoric background of Greek 
history. The contrast of personal and impersonal poetry 
is indeed found in literatures which have passed far 
beyond the clan age. Thus, the epic poetry of medieval 
France has been divided into the popular and the 
individual narrative, the former sung or chanted to a 
monotonous tune, the latter artistically recited.* But 
the contrast of the choral and personal lyric carries 
us back much farther than feudalism, and brings out 
some of the earliest characteristics of song and conse- 
quently of literature. Some pictures of communal 
festivals will enable us to realise how much older are 
these choral songs than any courtly makings of the 
troubadours. 

We are among the Dacotahs of North America. We 
are present at the sacred feast of one of their clans, “ The 
Giant’s Clan,” as it is called. High festival is now being 
* Hueffer’s Troubadours, p. 11. 


102 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


held in honour of Ha-o-kah, “ The Giant.” We enter 
the wigwam within which the ceremony is taking place. 
Bound a fire, over which are boiling kettles full of meat, 
there are Indians dancing and singing. They wear no 
clothing but a conical cap of birch, so streaked with 
paint as to represent lightning, and some strips of birch 
round their loins. As they sing and dance they thrust 
their bare hands into the boiling pots, pull out pieces of 
meat and eat them scalding hot. For does not the god, 
Ha-o-kah, in whose honour they dance and sing, shield 
them from all pains ? * Here, and in many like cases, it 
is clear that the words of the choral song are altogether 
of secondary importance — the magic symbolism of dance 
and gesture is nearly everything. We watch an infant 
drama, a savage mystery-play, in which dance and music 
and gesticulation are as yet confusedly blended. Perhaps 
in the next tribe we meet we may find another of these 
infant dramas going on. Here the supply of buffalo- 
meat has fallen short. The prairie is deserted by the 
herds. Somehow a new supply must be secured ; and 
the magic dance which the braves are now performing is 
designed to lure back the herds to the old hunting- 
grounds. The Indians, dressed in buffalo skins, are 
dancing the Buffalo-Dance; and, as each tired warrior 
drops out, acting as he does so the death of the buffalo, 
another brave takes his place ; and so the dance goes on, 
perhaps for weeks, until the object of the magic rite is 
secured and a herd discovered on the prairies. Here, 
again, the symbolism is everything; as yet we are far 
from having reached the stage at w'hich the v r ords of the 
choral song are separated from the music and the dancing, 
much less written dowrn. 

♦ Dr. Schoolcraft’s History , Condition , and Prospects of the Indian 
Tribes in the United States, pt. iii. p. 487. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


103 


Let ns pass from the hunting-grounds of the Red 
Indian to the Mir, or village community, of Russia. It 
is a fine spring day, and the girls * of the Mir have 
determined to hold their “circle” or Khorovod, their 
village festival of blended dance and song. In holiday 
dress they are now streaming towards the open space 
where the Khorovods are held — the choros, or “ dancing 
ground,” of the commune, as a Greek of the Homeric age 
would have called it. “When the appointed spot is 
reached,” says Mr. Ralston, in his Songs of the Russian 
People, “ they form a circle, take hands and begin moving 
this way and that, or round and round. If the village is 
a large one, two Khorovods are formed, one at each end of 
the street; and the two bands move towards each other, 
singing a song which changes, when they blend together, 
into the Byzantium-remembering chorus, * To Tsargorod 
will I go, will I go ; With my lance the wall will I pierce, 
will I pierce/ ” Little dramas, too, we might see these 
Khorovods performing, if we had time. But we must pass 
on to another picture of communal song-dances; only let 
us note in passing how the singing and dancing are of 
greater import than the words or the authorship of the 
song. The village, like the tribal, community has far 
less to do with written poetry and personal authorship 
than with the dramatic dance. 

But now we are in Sparta, spectators of the Gymnopsedia , 
or festival of “ naked youths.” Large choruses of men 
and boys are taking part in the festival ; and, as in 
medieval towns the burghers assisted at the mystery- 
plays, the general body of the Spartan citizens joins 
in the song and dance, and has not yet become mere 
onlookers at a professional performance.! The boys in 

* Of. the Parthenia, or “Maidens’ Choruses,” of the Greeks. 

t Cf. Muller’s Dorians , bk. iv. ch. G. 


104 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


their dances are imitating the movements of wrestling 
and the pancration ; and soon they will begin the wild 
gestures of the Bacchanalian worship. It is a choral 
carnival in which an outburst of communal feelings has 
for the moment drowned the little voices of self-interest. 
These choral dances and songs contrast remarkably with 
the personal and artistic lyrics of an Alcaeus or Sappho ; 
and perhaps this is one reason why the intensely personal 
art of later Greece cared so little to preserve them. 
However this may be, our communal song-makers of the 
Greek city, as of the Russian village community and 
the Indian tribe, are a group in which individual song- 
making and the celebration of individual feelings are 
still in the background. 

§ 29. Dr. Hans Flach, in his History of the Greek 
Lyric * has written with all a German scholar’s usual 
erudition on the folk-songs of the Greeks, their develop- 
ment of flute-playing, the Oriental influences on then- 
lyric, and other topics deeply interesting to the special 
student of Greek literature. We cannot, however, regard 
Dr. Flach’s book as an adequate study of the choral or 
the personal lyric from the standpoint of social life in 
early Greece. We believe that K. 0. Muller’s method 
of studying the beginnings of Greek song in close 
company with social life has been too much neglected 
by recent subjective criticism. Nay, farther, we believe 
the study of early Greek poetry as dependent on social 
development in Greece to be only a step towards a larger 
comparative study, which shall forget classic exclusiveness 
to learn from Norse or Arab as well as from Thrace and 
Pieria. The truth is that when we soberly survey the 
materials out of which Dr. Flach and others would build 
up a history of lyric poetry in Greece, wo find them 
* Tubingen, 18S3. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 105 

singularly inadequate. We find ourselves hazarding 
theories of Greek lyrical progress without real knowledge 
of early Greek music and dances — two-thirds at least of the 
old choral poetry. Moreover, when it is remembered to 
how small an extent the evolutions of dancing, especially 
when of a dramatic character, can be expressed in words, 
and how improbable it is that the Greeks, in days 
when even writing was unknown, should have possessed 
any system of musical notation, it is hard to believe 
that accurate information on these subjects can have 
reached us through such channels as the works of a 
Plutarch or an Athenseus. We shall be contented, there- 
fore, to listen here to some echoes from old Greek choral 
song, observing how faint they are compared with the 
many voices of the personal lyric, and to support our 
belief that the choral was the oldest form of the Greek 
lyric, by comparison with other fragments of ancient 
song and by the communal organisation of early social 
life. 

Who does not remember the picture of the vintage- 
festival on the Shield of Achilles ? The beautiful 
vineyard, wrought in gold, is heavy with grapes, the 
black bunches hanging overhead, and ladders wrought 
in silver are standing all through the vineyard. Round 
about are the trench and hedge, and a single path leads 
to and fro for the grape-bearers at the vintage. Maidens 
and youths are gleefully bearing the luscious fruit in 
wattled baskets ; in their midst is a youth, playing- 
delightful ly on a clear-sounded harp and “ singing with 
sweet voice the lovely Linus Hymn,” while others, with 
measured beat of foot and with reels ((ncaipov-ng), are 
following with the cry of ai Line. The scholiast on this 
passage has preserved for us a specimen of this Linus 
Hymn which critics have variously emended. Adopting 


106 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the emendation of Bergk,* we may thus express the 
meaning and metre of the song in English : — 

“ O Linus, honoured of all gods, 

For unto thee have they given, 

First among men, to sing ditties 
Sung with the clear-sounding voices ; 

Phoebus in jealousy slays thee, 

Muses in sorrow lament tliee.” 

It has been observed that a pair of these lines with 
slight alteration can form an hexameter ; and, accordingly, 
the origin of the hexameter, with its strong caesura, has 
been found by some writers in the junction of two such 
lines. However this may be, both the form and spirit of 
the Linus Hymn are thoroughly primitive ; and whether 
we believe, with Muller, that it laments the tender beauty 
of the spring burned by the summer heat of Phoebus, or 
see in it the dirge of some human hero like the yearly 
lament of the Hebrew maidens over Jephthah’s daughter, 
we cannot but feel in it the communal air of the choral 
lyric in which, as in the Ialemus song, or the Tegean 
Sceplirus , or the Phrygian Lityerses, or the Syrian laments 
for Adonis, “ not the misfortunes of a single individual 
but a universal and perpetually recurring cause of grief 
was expressed.” f 

Again, this communal spirit meets us in traditionary 
choral songs of ancient Greece, consisting, like the 
Indian choral songs described by Dr. Schoolcraft, of a 
few words in which the principal thoughts were rather 
touched than worked out. Thus, as Plutarch tells us in 
his Life of Lyeurgus (ch. xxi.), there were in certain 
Spartan festivals responsive choruses of old men, young 
men, and boys. The chorus of old men began and sang — ■ 

“ Valiant young men once were we ; ” 


* Fragg. Lyr ., 1207. 

t K. 6. MUller, Hist. Git. Lit. (D maldson’s tr.), vol. i. p. 25. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


107 


the chorus of young men reply — 

“ We are still so ; if it please you, look upon us and rejoice ; ” 
and the chorus of boys rejoin — 

“ Yes, but we are yet to be stronger far than all of you.” # 

So the women of Elis, Plutarch tells us,f used to sing the 
ancient hymn — 

“ Ilero Dionysus, come 
To a holy ocean -shrine, 

With the Graces to a shrine, 

Rushing on with hoof of ox ; 

Holy ox ! 

Holy ox 1 ” 

But here we must be careful to draw a distinction 
between merely popular songs and the old communal 
poetry. Just as Simonides and Pindar represent that 
lyric which in the growing unity of Greek tribes and 
cities found an opportunity to rise above local idioms 
and local sympathies, just as in the Homeric epics we 
find a feeling of Greek unity in spite of local kings and 
tribal distinctions, so in the old choral songs we should 
expect strongly local feelings and a much weaker sense 
of common Greek kinship than is to be found either in 
the personal lyric or in the epic poetry. We cannot, 
therefore, hope for light on the character of the early 
Greek choral lyric from such fragments of popular songs 
as the address of the wandering minstrel to the potters 
(. Kerameis ), or the Eiresione of children going from house 
to house, levying what they can, in autumn during 
Apollo’s feast, preserved in the pseudo-Herodotean life 
of Homer. These are no more indications of clan poetry 
than the English street-ballad, or the Indian songs which 

* 'Ajj.es note ’ fines ’a\ ki/joi veaviai. 

'Ajx.es 5e y eijxes’ at 5e A 77 s, avyaerSeo. 

'Ajx.es y eca-ojieaQa iroAAy uappoves. 

+ Quaes. Grxc. y 36. 


108 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


civil servants in India have heard from the lips of 
wandering singers, and sometimes taken down in writing 
as specimens of primitive song-making. Such fragments, 
perhaps all extant fragments of Greek song, belong to 
days when the local life of the Greek tribes and cities 
had lost much of its early separateness ; indeed, the 
development of Greek language as well as sympathy 
must have been largely fatal to the preservation of old 
local song. Even the specimens of early song just given 
cannot, therefore, be accepted as really carrying us back 
to the local origines of Greek poetry. Still we may gain 
from them some conception of such poetry. In the same 
way, there are ancient descriptions of these choral lyrics 
which may be accepted as truthful, and graphic pictures of 
early, though not the earliest, Greek song-makers. Two 
of these we shall now present as belonging respectively to 
the autonomous city, and to the sacred festival of leaguered 
clans meeting at the seat of their league-god’s worship. 
Students of the Amphiktionic League need not be reminded 
of the prominent part played by such tribal federations in 
early Greek life, a part which at one time promised to be as 
prominent in the social life of Greece as the Berith or Sacred 
League (“ The Covenant ”) in that of the Hebrews, or the 
Sacred Months in the early history of the Arab tribes. 

§ 30. One of these descriptions brings before us the 
humenaios, or choral song of marriage, in the life of the 
old Greek city. The marriage festival is going on, and 
under the flashing lights of torches the bride is being 
conducted through the streets. “ Then a loud humenaios 
arises; dancing youths were whirling round (eSi'veov), 
while among them flutes and harps resounded ; and the 
women, standing at their thresholds, one and all admired 
and wondered.” * A like picture of the humenaios song 
* Iliad, xviii. 490-496. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


109 


and dance is given in the Shield of Hercules, attributed 
to Hesiod. “ Some bear the bride to the husband on the 
well-formed chariot; while a loud humenaios arises. 
Burning torches borne by boys cast from afar their 
lights ; forward move the damsels beaming with beauty. 
Both are followed by joyful choruses. One chorus, of 
youths, sing to the clear sound of the pipe with tender 
mouths, and make the echoes to resound ; the other, of 
damsels, dance to the notes of the harp” * In this 
choral song of marriage in the early Greek city, the 
publicity of the festival and the communal sympathy of 
the citizens remind us that as yet the city demus is not 
far removed from the settled clan or village commune, 
and that the feelings of common kinship and connubium 
have not yet been altogether lost by the clans and tribes 
of the city. The epitaphios of Adonis is scarcely so far 
removed from the threnos, or dirge of the clan, as is the 
marriage song-dance of the commune from the artificial 
marriage-songs of modern poetry, such as, for example, 
the Prothalamion of Spenser. 

In the hymn to the Delian Apollo we have a glimpse 
of a Greek tribal league-festival, which reminds us of the 
Hebrew tribes going up to the place which Yahveh chose, 
or the Arab at the Fair of ’Okadh. No doubt this hymn 
as it has reached us, written in hexameter verse of 
thoroughly epic tone, is no true specimen of the old and 
sacred “ chorlyrik ” of Greece. But it may be accepted 
as an echo of those sacred chants which are known to 
have prevailed in the early worship of Greek communities, 
and a truly ancient picture of choral singers. The 
allusion, at the end of the lines here translated, to 
dramatic imitations of different languages or dialects 
shows that the religious hymn of the Greeks, like some 
* Hesiod, Scut., 274-280. Cf. K. O. Muller, Hist. Gh lit, ygl. i. p. 29. 


110 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of the Vedic hymns, or like the medieval service of the 
Mass, contained the germs of a drama. 

“ But in Delos, Phoebus, thou art happiest ; 

There Ionians long-robed gather for thee 
With their children and their lovely ladies ; 

So with boxing and with dance and singing 
When the games are set they gladly praise thee. 

He who met Ionians thus assembled 
Well might think them gods, to old age strangers, 

Looking on the men and well-girt women, 

Ships of speed, and many forms of wealth, 

And, beside, that wonder ne’er to perish, 

Girls of Delos, handmaids of Apollo, 

Handmaids of Apollo, the Far-Darter, 

Who, when first they hymn Apollo’s praises, 

Next remember Artemis and Leto, 

Artemis rejoicing in the arrow ; 

Then a hymn of ancient men and women 
Sing they, and delight the tribes assembled ; 

For they know to mimic tongues of all men 
And the rattle of the castanets, 

So that each would think his own speech uttered ; 

Such the skilful song they fit together.” * 

§ 31. The war-song, the marriage-hymn, the dirge, 
chants to the ancestral gods, songs of the spring and 
autumn festivals — these and such as these would nearly 
exhaust the varieties of the clan’s choral poetry. Many 
of these we perhaps hear at a distance in the more 
refined music of individual song-makers — the war-song, 
for example, in the embateria or anapaestic marches of 
Tyrtaeus, the dirge in such fragments of the threnos as 
those of Pindar. In any work aiming at an exhaustive 
treatment of early choral song, the close communion of 
music and early poetry would require a special study 
of vocal and instrumental music in their besrinninofs. 
Such treatment in the present work, however, is clearly 
impossible ; and the student can only be referred to the 
works of specialists, such as that of Dr. Flach previously 
mentioned. The beginnings of music and metres appear 


* Hymn to Delian Apollo, 11. 14G-1G4. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


Ill 


to have been almost as closely connected in Hebrew, 
Indian, and Chinese literatures as in the early lyrics of 
Greece, and the development of music and religious 
ritual seem, at least up to a certain point, to have been 
closely united in all these literatures. Without entering 
on any technical discussions of Greek or Hebrew, much 
less Indian or Chinese, music, we can discover abundant 
evidences showing that clans or guilds of bard-musicians, 
for the most part sacred, were the chief makers of early 
poetry ; and without some such organisation it is difficult 
to imagine how the old song-dances could have been 
developed. 

Among the early composers of Greek hymns stand out 
prominently the Eumolpids of Eleusis in Attica. To 
this clan the chief sacerdotal functions in connection 
with the worship of Demeter are known to have descended 
as an hereditary privilege. The very name of the clan — 
“ Beautiful Singers ” * — points to their original office of 
sacred choristers ; and, if the social development of the 
Greeks had resembled that of the Indian Aryans or the 
Hebrews, these hereditary musician-priests might have 
grown into Brahmanic or Levitic castes. In the Lycomids 
of Attica we have another clan of sacred singers ; and at 
Athens the playing of the Kithara at processions belonged 
to another clan, the Eunids. But these clans of musicians 
were by no means confined to Attica. Like the Hebrew 
clans of musician-poets, to which we shall presently refer, 
the flute-players of Sparta continued their art and their 
rights in families. To a family of musicians Terpander, 
the Lesbian, the reputed founder of Greek music, belonged. 
Simonides of Keos, who exercised the functions of chorus- 

# Cf. Swinburne’s Erechtheus, 11. 52, 53 — 

“ Eumolpus ; nothing sweet in ears of tliino 
The music of his making,” etc. 


112 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


teacher at the town of Earth ®a, belonged to another 
such family. Other members of this family were Bac- 
chylides and Simonides the younger, the writer on 
genealogies. Finally, Pindar himself seems to have 
belonged to a family in which music was a kind ot 
hereditary art.* Early epic poetry, also, was apparently 
arranged and perfected for recital, perhaps in some cases 
actually composed, by similar clans or castes of bards. 
Such, for example, were the Homeridse of Chios, who, 
even if they were not a clan (ytvog) of really common 
descent, were organised on the clan model like the Hebrew 
“sons of the prophets.” Even the dramatic poets, as we 
shall see hereafter, did not altogether lose the hereditary 
culture of the poetic art. 

Turning to the united cultivation of music and song 
among the Hebrews, we find the clearest evidences of its 
communal nature. Before the organisation of Yahveh’s 
central worship we find local bodies, apparently organised 
on the clan model, engaged in this culture under the 
guidance of a leader, much as each town in early Greece 
appears to have had its chorodidaslcalos, or teacher of the 
chorus. In one placet we have a picture of “a band of 
Nabis ” — a word by no means satisfactorily translated by 
the Greek word “ prophet ” — “ descending from the high 
place, and before them lyre, and timbrel, and flute, and 
harp, while they dance and sing together as Nabis ” 
( mithnabbeim ). There is another bard-clan at Naioth — 
“an assembly of Nabis singing and dancing, with Samuel 
standing as leader over them.”J Such also are the “sons 
of” (an ordinary Hebrew and Arab expression for clan) 
“the Nabis ” at Jericho, and the “sons of the Nabis ” 

* K. O. Muller, Hist. Gh. Lit., pp. 34, 199, 263, 275, 289, vol. i. ; ami 
cf. authorities cited. 

t 1 Sam. x. 5. 


t 1 Sam. xix. 20. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


113 


who sit before Elisha at Gilgal.* After the establishment 
of central government, however, among the Hebrew tribes, 
the service of the temple was directly modelled on the 
hereditary system of the clan or caste; and “sons” of 
Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun, became not only the per- 
formers but apparently the arrangers and composers of 
sacred hymns. 

How far communal hymn-making extended in the 
early literatures of India and China it is now possible 
only to conjecture. Each of the Suktas (metrical prayers 
or hymns) of the Kig-Veda is attributed to a Bishi, or 
holy and inspired author. But the hymns of the Bik — 
evidently the oldest of the Vedas from the manner in 
which its hymns enter into the composition of the three 
later Vedas, Yajur, Sauna, Atharva — contain no directions 
for their use, the occasions on which they were to be 
employed, or the ceremonies at which they were to be 
recited ; these were pointed out by later writers, in the 
Sutras , or precepts relating to the ritual ; and even the 
deities in whose honour the hymns were composed are for 
the most part known to us through independent authori- 
ties, especially an Anukramanika, or index accompanying 
each Veda. We cannot, therefore, attach much value to 
the reputed authorship of these ancient hymns. Yet it is 
worth observing that the Suktas of the Kik are arranged 
on two methods, one of which would seem to bring before 
us directly the communal authorship of the hymns. The 
arrangement by Khandas (portions), Ashtakas (eighths), 
Adhyakas (lectures), does not seem to depend on any fixed 
principle ; but in the arrangement by Mandalas, “circles,” 
six out of the ten “ circles ” comprise hymns by the 
same person or by members of the same family. Thus the 
hymns of the third Mandala are ascribed to Viswamitra 
* 2 Kings ii. 5 ; iv. 38. 


114 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and his sons or kinsmen ; of the fifth, to Atri and his 
sons ; of the seventh, to Vasishtha and his descendants. 
The ceremonies (offerings of clarified butter and the fer- 
mented juice of the Soma plant) of which these ancient 
hymns formed the verbal portion, seem to have taken 
place in the dwelling of the worshipper in a chamber set 
apart for the purpose ; and the absence of allusion to 
temples or other public places of worship in the hymns 
apparently implies their family or clan character. We 
may, therefore, agree with Professor Wilson that the 
hymns of the Rik “ were probably composed in many 
instances by the heads of families, or of schools following 
a similar form of worship, and adoring in preference par- 
ticular deities.” * And if it is probable that different 
Indian families “ had their own heroes, perhaps their own 
deities, and kept up the memory of them by their own 
poetic traditions,” f if parts of the Veda are represented 
as actually belonging to such illustrious families, is it not 
still more probable that in China, the ancient seat of 
ancestor worship, the old hymns to the dead (some of 
which have come down to us in the Shill King) were 
regarded as the common property of the family or 
clan? 

§ 32. In the Roman song of the Arval Brothers we 
have a specimen of the sacred guild-chant more closely 
allied to the solemn psalm of the Hebrew musician-castes, 
or the earnest appeals to Indra and other deities in the 
Yedic hymns, than to the artistic spirit of the Delian 
Hymn. In Rome, as among the Hebrews and the Indian 
Aryans, clan life long retained an intense vitality ; and 
when it is remembered how the archaic family-system of 
the Romans, itself descended from the clan, formed the 

* Preface to translation of First Ashtalici, or Book, of Rig-Veda, p. xvii , 

t Max Muller, Hist. Anc. Sans. Lit., p. 55. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


115 


basis of Roman law, it need not surprise us that this 
song of a religious brotherhood is to be reckoned among 
the oldest of Rome’s literary monuments. This primitive 
hymn was discovered at Rome in 1778, on a tablet con- 
taining the acts of the sacred college. Varro tells us that 
these Arval Brothers — “Brothers of the Fields” — were 
a rustic priesthood whose duty it was “ to perform public 
rites that the fields (arva) may bear fruits.” * At the 
Ambarvalia, or Lustration of the Fields, the Arval 
Brothers apparently performed for the Roman people as 
a community what each house-father did for his own 
farm. Cato f and Tibullus f have described these Ambar- 
valian ceremonies, which seem to have been thoroughly in 
keeping with the agricultural spirit of certain Hebrew 
festivals. As in the Carmen S secular e of Horace, in 
spite of Sapphic measure having displaced the old Satur- 
nian, and sundry other signs of Greek influence, we may 
fancy an elegant improvement of the old communal 
hymns of Rome, so in the elegiac poem of Tibullus on 
the Ambarvalia we may find, if not an imitation of the 
Arvalian prayer, at least a description of the festival. 

“ Whosoe’er is by, be silent : 

Fruits and iields we purify 
As the rite, from hoary ages 
Handed duly, doth ordain. 

Bacchus, come with tender vine-branch 
Hanging from tiiy horns, and Ceres 
Bind thy temples with the corn-ears. 

Rest the earth this holy dawning, 

Rest the ploughman from his toiling, 

Let his heavy work be ended 
While the ploughshare idle hangs. 

Loose the yoke-chains; now by full stalls 
Oxen with wreathed heads shall stand. 

For the god be all things sacred ; 

Nor let any set her hand 

Woollen-weaving to the task-work. . . . 


* Varro, L. L., v. 85. 


t It. It., 141. 


t El, II. 1. 


116 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Look you, how to shining altars 
Goes the consecrated lamb, 

While a white-robed crowd attendeth, 

All their locks with olive bound.” 

The next few lines seem to contain the prayer, which 
in its simplicity has at least all the appearance of being 
imitated, so far as elegiac metre and classical Latin 
would allow, from the old hymns. 

“ Gods ancestral, we are purging 

Fields and country-folk together ; 

Drive ye mischief from our confines ; 

Let no crop with shoots deceptive 
Mock the harvest, nor the slow lamb 
Fly the bounding wolves in fear.” 

The prayer is over, and the worshippers, confident in 
their due performance of the rites, may now enjoy their 
domestic amusements. 

“ Blithely, then, for full fields trustful, 

Let the countryman pile up 
On the blazing hearth the big logs, 

While a crowd of household slaves, 

Goodly marks of thriving farmers, 

Dance and build of twigs toy-houses.” * 

The rest of the poem is modern enough in thought and 
sentiment, at one moment smacking of the Horatian 
wine-jar, at another recalling Lucretian theories of social 
progress. 

The legendary origin of the Ambarvalia was that Acca 
Laurentia, foster-mother of Romulus, had twelve sons, 
with whom once every year she sacrificed for the fields. 
On the death of one of these sons, Romulus took his 
place, it was said, and with his eleven foster-brothers con- 
stituted the first college of the Fratres Arvales. At the 
yearly festival, which took place in May, the members of 
the college wore, as a sign of their priestly rank, crowns 

* Tibullus, El. II. i. ; for last line translated, cf. Hor., Sat. II. iii. 247, 
cedificare casas. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


117 


of ears of corn bound with white ribbons. The following 
translation of the ancient hymn is taken from Words- 
worth’s Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin* 

“Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us! 

And thou, O Marmar, suffer not 
Fell plague and ruin’s rot 
Our folk to devastate. 

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate ! 

Leap o’er the threshold ! Halt ! now beat the ground. 

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate ! 

Leap o’er the threshold ! Halt ! now beat the ground. 

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate ! 

Leap o’er the threshold ! Halt ! now beat the ground. 

Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain ; 

Call, call the heroes all. 

Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain. 

Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us ! 

Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again ; 

Bound high and bound again ! ” 

§ 33. This primitive hymn clearly combined the 
sacred dance (suggestively marked by such a name as the 
Carmen Saliare) with the responsive chant ; and the 
prominence of the former suggests how readily the pro- 
cessional or stationary hymn might grow into a little 
drama symbolising the supposed actions of the deity 
worshipped. Professor Reville, in his interesting study 
of Mexican and Peruvian religions as illustrating the 
general growth of religious ideas throughout the world, f 
rightly assigns a very prominent place to the sacred 
dance. Referring to the Peruvian hymns to the sun 
which were chanted at great festivals, every strophe 
ending with the cry “ Hailly,” or “ Triumph,” he remarks 
that “ the grand form of religious demonstration among 
the Peruvians was the dance. They were very assiduous 
in this form of devotion ; and indeed we know what a 
large place the earliest of the arts occupied in the primi- 
tive religions generally. The dance was the first and the 

* Vide pp. 386 tqq. + Hibbert Lectures for 1884. 


118 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


chief means adopted by prehistoric humanity of enter- 
ing into active union with the god adored. The first 
idea was to imitate the measured movements of the god, 
or, at any rate, what were supposed to be such. After- 
wards, this fundamental motive was more or less for- 
gotten; but the rite remained in force, like so many 
other religious forms which tradition and habit sustained 
even when the spirit was gone. In Peru this tradition 
was still full of life. The name of the principal Peruvian 
festivals, Baymi, signifies a ‘dance/ The performances 
were so animated that the dancers seemed to the Euro- 
peans to be out of their senses. It is noteworthy that 
the Incas themselves took no part in these violent dances, 
but had an * Incas’ dance ’ of their own, which was grave 
and measured.” * When it is remembered that the 
choral hymn is not merely, as M. Burnouf tells us,f “ the 
first literary form that poetic thought assumed among 
the Aryan race,” but even contains apparently the germs 
of lyric and dramatic poetry alike in the West and East, 
this accompaniment of choral song by symbolic dancing, 
which is found in many parts of the world, and has left 
its marks on dramas so widely removed in their social 
conditions as those of Athens and Japan, must be 
regarded as a very significant fact in the growth of 
literature. 

As the Russian Khorovods performed by girls may 
enable us to realise the Greek parthenia, or the hymeneal 
chorus with its responses of youths and maidens, { so the 
symbolical song-dances of American Indian tribes, while 
supplying interesting parallels to such dances as the 

* Hibb. Lect. 1884, p. 224. f Essai sur le Veda , p. 31. 

X Cf. Catullus, Ixii. — a poem in which the burdeu, “ Hymen O 
Hymenase, Hymen ades 0 Hymenaee,” like the ou d£w rbv 'ASc cviv of Bion, 
or the &pxeTe 2,iKt\u<al of Mosckus, seem like distant echoes of ancient 
hymeneal or threnic choruses. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


119 


Pyrrhic of the Greeks, may enable us to catch the spirit 
of the sacred dance in spite of the trivial associations of 
modern dancing. In the American Indian war-dance, 
the tribal leader, with his war-club in his hands smeared 
with vermilion to symbolise blood, raises the war-song, 
accompanied by drum, and rattle, and the voices of a few 
choristers. The song, brief and full of repetition, is 
repeated slowly and with measured cadence, to which the 
most exact time is kept, the singer every few minutes 
stepping out of his circular path to shout the war-cry. 
Clearly the words he sings are far from occupying the 
most prominent place in the aesthetic appreciation of the 
Indian ; for him the graceful dance, the graphic symboli- 
sation of battle and victory by vehement gestures, the 
familiar music of drum and rattle and the voices of the 
choristers carry a significance scarcely imaginable by 
bookish minds. Still, a specimen of the words may be 
here quoted from Dr. Schoolcraft’s work on the Indian 
tribes as an aid in realising the nature of these song- 
dances. 

“ Hear my voice, ye warlike birds I 

I prepare a feast for you to batten on ; 

I see you cross the enemy’s lines ; 

Like you I shall go. 

I wish the swiftness of your wings ; 

I wish the vengeance of your claws ; 

I muster my friends ; 

I follow your flight. 

Ho ! ye young men that are warriors, 

Look with wrath on the battle-field I ” * 

In the same work Dr. Schoolcraft gives us a picture of 
the famous Arrow-Dance , as described by an eye-witness, 
Surgeon Ten Broeck, who served in the United States 
army in Hew Mexico, 1851-2. Part of this description 
may be here quoted as a very vivid illustration of the 

* Hist. Ind. Tribes in U.S., pt. ii. p. CO. 


120 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


symbolic dance. “ After dancing and singing fifteen or 
twenty minutes, the sound of another torribe (Indian drum) 
is heard, and another brave, with a malinchi (girl specially 
attired) and his friends, shouting and whooping, enter on 
the north side (a similar party having previously assumed 
a position on the south side of the plaza), and, ranging 
themselves opposite to the first party, commence the 
same kind of performance. The tombe of the first party 
then ceases; and one of the men, going out, leads the 
brave in front of his friends, who are drawn up in two 
ranks. Here he is placed on one knee, his bow and arrow 
still in his hand, while the malinchi commences the Fleeka 
or Arrow-Dance. At first she dances along the line in 
front of him, and by her gestures shows that she is 
describing the ‘ war-path.’ Slowly she pursues, but 
suddenly her step quickens — she has come in sight of 
the enemy. The brave follows her with his eye, and the 
motion of his head intimates that she is right. She 
dances faster and faster — suddenly she seizes an arrow 
from him, and now by frantic gestures it is shown that 
the fight has commenced in earnest. She points with 
the arrow — shows how it wings its course — how the scalp 
was taken and Laguna victorious. As she concludes the 
dance, and returns the arrow to the brave, firearms are 
discharged, and the whole party wend their way to the 
Estufa, to make room for another warrior and his friends ; 
and thus the dance was maintained, warrior succeeding 
warrior, until dusk.” If any one doubts the world- wide 
influence of such symbolical dancing on the development 
of early lyric and dramatic poetry, let him reflect upon 
the prominence of symbolic action in a sphere in which 
it was far less to have been expected — early law.* 

Side by side with these American examples of symbolic 
* Cf. Maine's Ancient Law, ch. x. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


121 


dancing may be placed some Chinese illustrations of like 
symbolism. Just as the Sanskrit term for “ drama ” 
(nataJca) properly applies to “dancing,” so the earliest 
kind of dramatic spectacle among the Chinese seems 
to have been pantomimic dances closely connected 
with religion. “ The majority of these dances,” says 
M. Bazin,* “ were symbolic, and represented the business 
of tillage, the pleasures of harvest, the fatigues of war, or 
the comforts of peace. The dancers bore shields, battle- 
axes, and banners, according to the various religious 
ceremonies. ... In his notes on the Chou-King, Gaubil 
speaks of a Chinese treatise on the dance ; the author has 
there given the following description of an ancient 
pantomime. ‘ The dancers sallied out on the northern 
side. Scarcely had they taken a few steps when, suddenly 
changing the order in which they had come, they 
symbolised by attitudes, gestures, evolutions, a battle 
array. In the third direction the dancers kept advancing 
southwards ; in the fourth, they formed a kind of' line ; 
in the fifth, they represented the two ministers, Tcheou- 
kong and Tchao-Jcong, who aided Wou-wang with their 
advice ; in the sixth, they kept motionless like the 
mountains. This dance w r as a history of the conquest 
of China by Wou-wang , who, entering the empire, defeated 
Xing Cheou , penetrated farther and farther, fixed the 
limits of his states, and governed them by the wise 
counsels of his two ministers/” These old Chinese 
pantomimes, like the rude farces of early Rome, became 
after a time, in spite of their religious origin, so obscene 
that they required to be .checked by law. But the early 
union of dance and song in China seems to have left its 
marks on Chinese criticism. . In the Great Preface to 
the collection of ancient Chinese odes known as the Shih 
* Theatre Chinois, pp. ix., x. 


122 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


King, poetry, song, and dance are pictured as a kind of 
graduated scale of emotional expression. The passage, 
as translated by Dr. Legge, is as follows : “ Poetry is the 
product of earnest thought. Thought cherished in the 
mind becomes earnest ; exhibited in words it becomes 
poetry. The feelings move inwardly, and are embodied 
in words. When words are insufficient for them, recourse 
is had to sighs and exclamations. When sighs and 
exclamations are insufficient for them, recourse is had 
to the prolonged utterance of song. When these pro- 
longed utterances of song are insufficient for them, un- 
consciously the hands begin to move and the feet to 
dance.” 

§ 34. Like the Indian and Chinese, the Greek symbol- 
ised the actions of battle in his dances. The dancers in 
the Pyrrhic dance even bore the same name as the 
practised and armed combatant ( prulis ) ; * and we learn 
from a passage in Plato’s Laws t that this Pyrrhic dance 
imitated all the attitudes of defence — avoiding the 
thrust, retreating, springing up, crouching down — and the 
opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances. 
We have now scanty means of estimating the perfection 
to which artistic dancing was brought in the progress of 
the Greek choral lyric save the complicated strophes and 
antistrophes of Pindar and the dramatic chorus. But the 
union of symbolic dance with choral song at the beginnings 
of Greek literature may be easily illustrated. 

In the choral dance which Vulcan represents on the 
shield of Achilles we have clear indications of dramatic 
action accompanying the choral song, as it sometimes 
does in the dance-songs of the Eussian Mirs. “ At one 
time the youths and maidens dance round nimbly with 
measured steps, as when a potter tries his wheel whether 
* Cf. Miiller, Dorians , bk. iv. ch. 6. f vii. p. 815. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


123 


it will run ; at another they dance in rows opposite one 
another. . . . Among them sang and played upon his 
harp a bard divine, and two tumblers whirled among 
them as the song directed/’ 

Soiw 5e KvPi(TTT]Trjps tear 1 avrovs 
MoA7n}s e^dpxovros itiivevov Kara fiercrovs* 

So, in the hymn to the Delian Apollo, Delian maidens in 
the service of Apollo sing a hymn which pleases the 
assembled multitude, and consists partly in a dramatic 
imitation of different languages or dialects, and partly 
in the production of certain sounds by instruments ap- 
parently resembling the Spanish castanets.f Again, 
Ulysses, looking at the Phaeacian youths who form the 
chorus of the song of Demodokus, admires not the sweet- 
ness of their voices but (as Gray might have expressed 
it) the glance of their many-twinkling feet. “ So spake 
the godlike Alkinous, and a herald uprose to bear a 
hollow lyre from the royal house. Then judges of the 
folk, nine chosen men in all, who w r ere wont to order all 
things well in the contests, stood up ; they levelled the 
dancing-place (xopov) and made a fair wide ring. So, 
bearing a loud-sounding lyre for Demodokus, the herald 
drew near ; and Demodokus gat him into the midst, and 
round him stood boys in their first bloom, skilled in the 
dance, and. they struck the good floor with their feet; 
and Ulysses gazed at the twinkling feet ( pappapvyag 
Otiuro 7 ro$uv) and marvelled in spirit.” { Indeed, the 
very words moZpe and melpesthai, applied as they were by 
the Greeks to singing, dancing, and even any graceful 
gesticulation (as in a game at ball §), significantly mark 

* n ., xviii. 590-G06. 

t 11. 161-lGt, translated above; cf. K. O. Muller, Hist. Gk. Lit., 
pp. 32, 33. 

x Od.y viii. 25G-265. § Cf. Od.> vi. 101. 


124 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the close union of song, instrumental music, dance and 
mimetic action in early Greece. 

As the dancer speaking the epilogue at the end of 
Shakspere’s Henry IV., Part II. , or the allegorical 
herald Rumour “ painted full of tongues ” at the begin- 
ning of the same play, or the Vice “ with his dagger of 
lath ” in Twelfth Night , or the Shaksperian clowns with 
their tag-ends of popular songs, carry us back to the 
rude beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, so in these 
choral dance-songs we may see survivals from the 
rude efforts of literary art in early Greece. How far 
these combinations of dance, and song, and symbolic 
gesture were infant dramas our scanty means of informa- 
tion do not now enable us to decide. But we are by no 
means left to picture their nature from choral songs of 
early Greeks alone. Among the Hebrews, for example, 
we find a similar connection between music, dance, 
violent gesticulation, and choral song. Early Hebrew, 
like early Greek, song, discloses itself in the form of the 
choral lyric. Indeed, the dance-song seems to have 
occupied a more prominent place in Hebrew than in 
Greek literature, just as the clan and tribe retained a 
stronger hold on Hebrew than on Greek life. 

From the days of tribal and local worship to those 
in which the centralised religion of Yahveh had cast its 
shadow over old local associations and traditions, the 
dance-song is the choral hymn of Israel. Thus, in the 
early days of tribal federalism, at the feast of Yahveh 
held from year to year in Shiloh, the maidens of the 
town come out to “ dance in the dances ; ” * and, long 
after the worship of Y'ahveh has been centralised and 
organised, his worshippers are exhorted in one of the 
choral lyrics collected in the books of psalms “ to praise 
* Judg. xxi. 21. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


125 


the name of Yahveh in the dance.” * So important was 
song in national tradition and worship, that not only do 
we find the Hebrew law-chronicle appealing to folk-songs 
as among the earliest sources of the history of the tribes,! 
but the teaching of song (possibly a leading duty of the 
early Nobis) is directly ordained by the priestly law- 
book.! Old polytheistic worship, against which Yahvism 
waged a long conflict, also possessed the choral song- 
dance as the essence of its ceremonial. Thus, we find 
the early Hebrews before the idol of the calf singing and 
dancing songs of such a rude description that it was 
possible for them to be mistaken for shouts of war.§ The 
violent character of the sacred dance among the Hebrews 
reminds us of the Peruvian Bay mi ; and a still more 
interesting parallel is observable in the degradation 
which such dancing seems to have undergone among the 
Hebrews as among the Peruvians. The Nobis combined 
dance and song ; for example, Miriam “ the prophetess,” 
Nebiah , takes a timbrel in her hand while the women 
“ go out after her with timbrels and with dances.” || “ To 
play the Ndbi” apparently meant to sing, dance, and 
violently gesticulate, so violently indeed that the verb 
ndbd is used of madness and excited raving. In a well- 
known passage of Hebrew story this violence of gesticu- 
lation is very prominently brought out. Saul has sent 
messengers to seize David at Naioth, a centre of Ndbi 
culture, and the king’s messengers, thrice sent, have 
thrice been infected by the spirit of the place and joined 
in the sacred festival. “ Then Shaul himself went to the 
high place and came to the large well that is by the 

* Ps. cxlix. t For example, the song of the well, Numb. xx. 17. 

% Deut. xxxi. 19. § Exod. xxxii. 17-19. 

|| Exod. xv. 20. The word yatza , “ go out,” is the same as that applied 
to the maidens of Shiloh “going out” of their town to dance in the 
dances (Judg. xxi.), and seems to betray the social conditions under 
which the author writes, viz. those of settled city life. 


126 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


hill and asked, * Where are Shemuel and David ? 5 Men 
said, ‘Yonder in Nayoth at the high place.’ So he went 
thither to the high place at Nayoth ; and even on him 
came the spirit of God, and, as he walked on, he acted 
the Ndbi till he reached the high place at Nayoth. 
Then he stripped off his garments himself, and himself 
acted the Ndbi, and fell down naked before Shemuel all 
that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, ‘ Is 
Shaul also among the Ndbis (1 Sam. xix. 22 sqq.). 
Bat such violent dancing was not altogether decorous 
for a king. David “ whirls about ” ( mekarker , “ whirling 
in a circle,” a word with which the Homeric expression 
ZSivevov, applied to the two “ tumblers,” should be com- 
pared) “ with all his might before Yahveh,” but in the 
eyes of Miclial he has “uncovered himself as one of 
the vain fellows shamelessly uncovers himself;”* and, 
though the incident is made to reflect honour on the 
king’s devotion to Yahveh, we may be sure that the 
orgiastic dance-song was softened down into stately pro- 
cessions in the civilised and centralised worship of 
Yahveh. Perhaps the latest survival of the violent 
gesticulation with which the Ndbis ’ name and worship 
had been associated among the early “ sons of Israel ” is 
to be seen in the symbolical action of later Ndbis , as 
when Ezekiel takes a tile and portrays upon it the 
beleaguered city of Jerusalem. But these men were 
rather lyrical preachers than leaders of communal song ; 
and if the gesticulations of the Ndbis ever contained the 
germs of a drama, the progress of social life among the 
Hebrews was clearly fatal to any such form of literary 
expression. The strength of clan life among the Hebrews 
(as that of family life among the early Romans) pre- 
vented the distinctness of personal character and the 
* 1 Sam. vi. 14, 20. 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


127 


degree of individual independence without which the 
drama has little or no place. 

§ 35. Thus, looking on choral songs of war or peace 
as the primary sources from which literature has every- 
where been developed, we may accept the vulgar canon 
that all literature begins in song ; but it is song widely 
differing in nature and in impersonal authorship from 
any to which modern art is accustomed ; it is a hymn 
strangely unlike the choral services of our civilised 
religions both in form and spirit. In this primitive 
song the words, the dance, the music (such as it is), and 
gesticulations contribute to make a unity nameless in 
the languagesof peoples far removed from the beginnings 
of social life. These curious combinations of mimicry 
and music, dancing and words, vary in their purposes. 
Sometimes they are magic incantations, sometimes they 
are war-songs, sometimes they are songs of marriage, 
sometimes they are dirges of death. In some the 
gestures predominate, in others the rude music, in 
others the refrain of a few simple words. But the main 
points to be borne in mind are that these elements are 
confused together, and that the mere preservation of the 
words alone cannot enable us to imagine the true 
nature of primitive song. Hence the impossibility of 
applying our highly-developed modern ideas of prose or 
verse to such performances. For not only have dance 
and gesticulation among us ceased to convey any sacred 
meaning, not only have we long distinguished these from 
the mimetic action of the regular drama, but we have 
also separated words from any accompaniment of music 
or dance, poetry from recitation as well as from these 
accompaniments, and prose from metrical forms which, 
far from being joined to dance and melody, or sustaining 
the memory in an age when writing was unknown* 


128 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


simply appeal to the reader’s sense of harmony through 
the medium of printed letters. Accustomed to artistic 
ideas based upon distinctions impossible in early social 
life, it is not strange that we neither possess the words, 
nor in many cases the imaginative powers, needful to 
carry us out of our own literary conditions into the 
primitive homes of literary development. 

In the progress of this literary differentiation we may 
observe some striking changes, not of course capable of 
chronological data — for they have everywhere occurred 
insensibly in the course of social development — but none 
the less real because they lie outside the range of such 
measurements. The gradual severance of acting, dancing, 
and musical accompaniment from the words of the song 
marks a whole series of such changes partially illustrated 
by the rhapsodists of early Greek, and the Rawy or reciter 
of early Arab, literature. Another and greater change 
than any of these is introduced by the invention of 
writing, parting still farther the music and gesticulation 
(which once supplied excellent props to the memory) 
from the bare words, and turning the attention of the 
makers of literature to the study of metres as distinct 
from music and recitation. Finally, the rise of prose 
composition as a distinct species of literature, at first 
apparently constructed largely on the older metrical models 
(as, for example, in the rythmical prose of the Qur’an), but 
afterwards passing by degrees into a plain reflection of 
public or private conversation, and finding its proper 
sphere in the speech or philosophic discussion, brings us 
far on the road to that severance of science from literature 
which characterises the most civilised communities. It 
is clear that the status of early song-makers must have 
undergone prodigious changes during this evolution of 
literary forms. It is clear that the communal culture 


EARLY CHORAL SONG. 


129 


of early literature, which among the Irish Celts, for 
example, seems to have left its traces in “ Literary 
Fosterage,” * breaks up with the decomposition of clans 
into their component families, and the farther develop- 
ment of personal freedom from such family restraints as 
those of the Eoman patria potestas. But, before we turn 
to this individualising process or to the evolution of 
literary forms, we shall illustrate another side of clan 
literature, viz. that on which the clansman’s personality, 
so far as communal sentiments permit, is most distinctly 
visible. 

* Sir Henry Maine ( Early History of Institutions , pp. 242 sqq.) lias 
cited evidences of Literary Fosterage in India resembling the Celtic. 
Signs of communal literary culture, however, are to bo found in any 
literature with which the author of the present work is at all acquainted. 


130 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CHAPTER III. 

PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 

§ 3(5. If we mean by “ personal ” poetry such laments for 
the individual’s growing age and regrets for his fleeting 
youth as appear to have been common in the songs of 
the Greek lyrical poets who represented an age of 
aristocratic individualism, if we mean the poetical 
expression of that individualising spirit which dwells 
with a kind of sad pleasure upon personal recollections 
of youth and the contrast of the ideal future of self with 
its real past, and which fondly dallies with reminiscences 
of times, and places, and persons, and things never again 
to be seen in the golden dream-light of vanished child- 
hood — then we must admit that the poetry of the clan 
cannot be called “ personal.” The life-view of the clan, 
like that of the lyric Greek, is indeed confined to earth, 
but its strong feelings of unity with kindred leave no 
place for such personal regrets, and look forward to the 
prolonged existence of the group not as a mere substitute 
for individual immortality (for of that ambition the clan 
knows little), but as the only kind of life worthy of 
enthusiastic contemplation. Poets of clan life, or deeply 
imbued with the spirit of clan life, know not the Greek 
melancholy of individual decay nor the modern melan- 
choly of individual hopes unsatisfied— the latter far more 
frequently the result of limitless personal ambitions than 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


131 


of any such spiritual cause as Mr. Browning seems 
inclined to assign it. Like Ezekiel picturing the ideal 
future of Israel under the figure of national clanship, the 
true clan poet socialises everything he touches. He 
knows nothing of personal introspection. His theme is 
not self, but the group of kinsmen to which he belongs ; 
if he sing of any hero, the whole body of clansmen share 
the eulogy ; in short, his poetical pictures are rather of 
men in groups than of individuals. We must not, 
therefore, expect “ personal ” poetry in the modem sense 
from the clan. 

But neither must we suppose that the clan age knows 
no personal poetry of its own, or that such poetry is less 
real than ours because it is conceived from a totally 
different standpoint. Sentiments and emotions are not, 
indeed, conceived as the peculiar property of the 
individual ; they are projected outwards like visible 
threads uniting the clansmen in a common objective 
existence. But they possess on this very account a 
peculiar vividness which the poetry of individual reflec- 
tion fails to reach. There is an intensity in clan 
affections, in clan hatreds, which, compared with the 
passions of individualised life, stands out like the figures 
in relief on the Arc de Triomphe contrasted with the flat 
surface of a painting; 

“ Sibb aefre ne maeg 
Wiht onwendan p&m pe wel pence<5.” * 

It is only by remembering this objectiveness of early 
personality and the social conditions it denotes that we 
shall solve an apparent paradox in the development of 
civilisation and literature. The barbarians, says M. 
Guizot, introduced into the modern world the sentiment 

* “Naught can alter tics of kinship 
In the man who thinks aright.” 

( Beowulf , 2G00-1.) 


7 


132 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of personal independence and the devotion of man to 
man. The progress of society, says Sir Henry Maine, 
has been from communal restraint to personal freedom. 
Both of these apparently conflicting statements are true. 
The personal independence of which M. Guizot speaks is 
the communal equality of fellow-clansmen, an indepen- 
dence which each possesses not because he is a man but 
because he is a clansman, an independence which, far from 
implying any “ offhangingness ** from the group, simply 
results from the union of the individual with his group. 
On the other hand, the personal independence in which 
Sir Henry Maine sees the latest outcome of a slow and 
fitful evolution is one which (to apply an expression of 
Savigny) draws a circle round each individual as distinct 
from his group and the government of his group, an inde- 
pendence which sets him apart from every tie of kinship 
in an isolation which primitive socialism would have 
contemplated and treated as a terrible calamity — the 
isolation of the clanless and the lordless man. 

§ 37. Over and above the choral song-dances of the 
clan, over and above communal hymns of all descriptions, 
we shall therefore be prepared to find some sort of per- 
sonal poetry in clan life. Moreover, it need not surprise 
us if such poetry should give the clearest insight into 
clan sentiments, for it is evidently in the relation of the 
clansman to his group that such sentiments are most 
distinctly expressed. Self-sacrificing devotion to the 
cause of the clan, uncompromising vengeance for the 
blood of slaughtered kinsfolk, justice in the distribution 
of the common property, faithfulness in the discharge of 
funeral obsequies — these and such as these are the ideal 
characteristics of the clansman ; and clearly they may be 
best illustrated where conditions of climate and soil have 
allowed the largest personal freedom compatible with a 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


133 


vigorous clan life. Such conditions may be found among 
the Arabs of the burning deserts. The Arab, on his 
horse or camel, shifting from spot to spot, cannot feel or 
express the impersonality of clan feelings with the in- 
tensity peculiar to settled village communities. In the 
early poetry of the Arab clans we shall accordingly find 
some of the best specimens of that personal expression of 
the clansman’s feelings which we seek to illustrate. 

Marzuki, in the preface of his Commentary on the 
Mufaddalian Poems (so called from their collector, A1 
Mufaddal, who made the anthology about the year 160 of 
the Hejira), tells us that a great deal of early Arab poetry 
owed its origin to tribal wars. “ I have been told,” says 
the Arab authority,* “ that Ali ben Mahdi, the Kisrawite, 
reported that in Attaif there were both poetry and 
reciters, but not in abundance. For poetry increased only 
during the wars between the tribes, such as happened 
among the Ausites and Ivasragites, and in the engage- 
ments and expeditions which were continually going on. 
Among the Kuraishites poetry was rare, for there were no 
inveterate animosities among them.” The passage reminds 
us of our Border Ballads ; but the presence of genuine 
clan sentiments, such as those of Blood-revenge, in. the 
early Arab poems carries us far nearer the beginnings of 
literature than Chevy Chace. Some examples of this Arab 
poetry we shall now offer from the Eamdseh, or “ Valour ,” 
an anthology so called because the first chapter contains 
verses on valour and manly behaviour. Collected about 
the year 220 of the Hejira by Abu Tammam, this 
anthology contains many short pieces of verse and frag- 
ments selected from complete odes. The collection is 
distributed into ten chapters, the first of which takes up 

* The words are translated from a Berlin manuscript by Professor 
Kosegarten, in tho introduction to his edition of the Huzailiau Poems. 


134 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


nearly half the work. The Arabic text, accompanied by 
a commentary of Tabrizi, Latin translation and notes, 
was published by Frey tag at Bonn in 1851. 

Perhaps the best specimen of the poetry of Blood- 
revenge to be found in any literature is a poem of this 
Hamaseh assigned to Ta’abbata Sherra, but attributed on 
better grounds to his sister’s son, and believed to refer to 
the vengeance taken by the nephew on his uncle’s slayers. 
Mr. C. J. Lyall, who has attempted to translate the poem 
into a metre resembling the Arab in the Journal of the 
Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1877, would find its author 
in Khalaf el-Ahmar, a famous imitator of old Arab 
poetry. But when we remember that early Arab poems 
were regarded as partially the property of the poet’s clan, 
we cannot treat the authorship of these poems as a pro- 
fitable inquiry. So far as Mr. Lyall’s effort to express the 
Arab metres in English is concerned, we can only regard 
it as a brilliant failure. Even if the English language 
permitted exactly the same metres as the Arabic — which 
was not to be expected and is not the case — the repetition 
of the same rime throughout an entire poem, a repetition 
which Mr. Lyall has not attempted except in a few very 
short poems translated in the same journal for 1881, 
would be fatal to such well-intended efforts. No modern- 
iser of the Chansons de Geste could try to reproduce in 
modern French the medieval monorimes with any hope 
of success ; and in English the attempt to transplant the 
Arab monorimes in any poem longer than a few lines 
must only result in a comic repetition of sounds so far as 
the attempt is even practicable. Since, therefore, the very 
structure of the English language prevents imitation of 
the most striking characteristic of early Arab poetry in 
point of form, why should we with Mr. Lyall seek to 
retain the Arab measures wajir, tawil y and the rest? 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


135 


These measures are scanned by feet, as in the Greek and 
Latin systems, and from the length of the Arab lines are 
often much more opposed to the English than hexameter, 
elegiac, or alcseic. In fact, the attempt to exactly re- 
produce Arab forms of poetry in English is based on a 
mistaken view of poetical form as something which has 
no necessary connection with the structure of languages. 
We shall, therefore, offer the following poem in a metre 
not unfamiliar to English ears, yet not very widely re- 
moved from the Arabic measure if the reader bears in 
mind that two lines of the English will generally corre- 
spond to one in the Arabic. Goethe, in his West-Oestlicher 
Divan , translated the poem into German from the Latin 
of Schultens, and though the effort to reproduce the Arab 
metre would have been much easier in German than in 
English, he has made no attempt of the kind. 

“ Dead in rocky cleft below Sal‘ 

Lies a man whose blood drips vengeance. 

He has left the burden to me, 

And I lightly lift and bear it — 

Heritage of bloodshed for me, 

Fearless son of his own sister — 

One whose grip none loses lightly, 

One whose downcast eyes are dripping 
Poison like the hooded asp. 

Ah ! the fearful tale has reached us, 

Saddest tale that ever sped ! 

One whose friend none dared belittle 
Tyrant Fate has severed from us ; 

Sunshine he in wintry season ; 

When the dog-star burned, a shadow; 

Lean he was, but not from lacking, 

Open-handed, open-hearted ; 

Where he journeyed, where he halted, 

Wariness and he were banded ; 

When he gave, a rushing rain-flood ; 

When he sprang, a mighty lion; 

Black his hair among his kindred 

Flowed, and trailed his robe of peace ;* 

But in war a thin-flanked wolf-whelp; 


* In peace the Arabs allowed their izdr, or waistwrapper, to trail on 
the ground ; in war it was girt tightly about their loins— a practice of the 
desert reminding us of the Roman “girding up his gown.” 


136 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


So he savoured gall and honey, 

One or other all men tasted ; 

• Fear he rode without companion 

Save his deep-notched blade of Yemen. 

Many warriors when the night fell 
Journeyed on until the dawning, 

Halted keen of eye and sword-blade, 

Sword-blades flashiug like the lightning; 

They were tasting sips of slumber, 

They were nodding — thou appcarest 
And they scatter at thy face ! 

Vengeance we have wreaked upon them, 

None escaped us but a few ; 

And if Hudheyl broke his sword-blade 
Many notches Hudheyl won ! 

Oft on rugged rocks he made them 

Kneel where hoofs are worn with running, 

Oft at dawn he fell upon them, 

Slaughtered, plundered, and despoiled. 

Valiant, never tired by evil, 

One whose sword drinks deep the first draught, 

Deep again the blood of foemen, 

Hudheyl has been burned by me. 

Wine no longer is forbidden, 

Hard the toil that made it lawful ! 

Reach me, Saw&d son of ‘Amru, 

Reach the cup — my strength is wearied 
With the winning of revenge. 

Drink to Hudheyl we have given 

From the dregs of Death’s own goblet— 

Shame, dishonour, and disgrace. 

Over Hudheyl laugh hyenas, 

Grin the wolves beside their corpses, 

And the vultures, treading on them, 

Flap their wings, too gorged to fly.” 

The poem will summon up recollections of the Coronach 
over Duncan in the Lady of the Lake, and the deed of 
vengeance in Cadyow Castle. But the pale cheek, glaring 
eyeballs, and bloody hands of Bothwellhaugh, as he 
springs from his horse and dashes his carbine to the 
ground, are melodramatic compared with the consuming 
passion of revenge in the terrible Arab fresh from that 
cleft of rocks below Sal‘ and the sight of his slaughtered 
kinsman, and glancing from his downcast eyes the 
poisoned glance of the hooded asp. We have here no 
“ spectre gliding by,” as in the Scotch tale, to watch the 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


137 


winning of revenge. The heart and hand of the Arab 
are remembered, his blood is to be avenged, but his 
spirit haunts not the rocks any more than that of his 
dead camel. The heritage of blood is a material burden 
which must be taken up and borne ; it is no ghost-voice 
crying from the grave. All this is in keeping with the 
clan spirit which turns away from the shadow-world of 
kinsmen, where punishment or reward are yet unknown, 
to the sphere of the dead man's achievements and the 
very real work of revenge. For the murdered Arab is 
only the central figure of a group ; around and behind 
him move his avenging kin, and even the virtues he 
possesses are rather those of a kinsman than of an indi- 
vidual in our modern conceptions of character. 

In Burckhardt’s Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys * 
occurs a passage which, as fully describing this communal 
nature of Arab Blood-revenge, deserves to be here quoted; 
it will show how widely the personal vengeance of a 
Bothwellhaugli is socially separated from the feelings of 
clan duty. “ It is a received law among the Arabs that 
whoever sheds the blood of a man owes blood on that 
account to the family of the slain person ; the law is 
sanctioned by the Qur’an, which says, * Whoever shall be 
unjustly slain, we have given to his heir the power of 
demanding satisfaction.’ The Arabs, however, do not 
strictly observe the command of their holy volume ; they 
claim the blood not only from the actual homicide but 
from all his relations, and it is these claims which con- 
stitute the right of Thar , or Blood-revenge. . . . This rests 
within the Khomse, or fifth generation, those only having 
a right to avenge whose fourth lineal ascendant is at 
the same time the fourth lineal ascendant of the person 
slain ; and, on the other hand, only those male kindred 
* Vol. i. p. H9. 


138 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of the homicide are liable to pay with their own blood 
for the blood shed whose fourth lineal ascendant is at 
the same time the fourth lineal ascendant of the homi- 
cide.* . . . The right of Thar is never lost ; it descends 
on both sides to the latest generations. It depends upon 
the next relation of the slain person to accept the price of 
blood. If he will not agree to the offered price of blood, 
the homicide and all his relations who are comprised 
within the Khomse take refuge with some tribe where the 
arm of vengeance cannot reach them. ... A sacred 
custom allows the fugitives three days and four hours, 
during which no pursuit after them is made. These exiles 
are styled djelawy, and some of them are found in almost 
every camp. The djeldwys remain in exile till their 
friends have effected a reconciliation, and prevailed on the 
nearest relations of the slain to accept the price of blood. 
Families of djeldwys are known to have been fugitives from 
one tribe to another (according as these became friendly 
or hostile to their original tribe) for more than fifty years.” 

§ 38. It is not difficult to collect examples of Blood- 
revenge inspiring the early poetry of the Arabs. Thus 
another poem of the Hamdseli begins — 

“ Surely shall I wash the blood-stain 
With my sword away, 

Ay, whatever fate of Allah 
Oome across my way ! ” f 

In another poem of the same anthology an ideal warrior 
is described as 

“ A man who girdeth night on ; 

Seldom cometh sleep for him ; his greatest care 
Is vengeance and to break the ranks right on.”J 


* Cf. Exod. xx. 5, “ Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the chil- 
dren, upon Ike third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me” 
(’al shillesbim ve-’al ribbe’im). f Ham., p. 355. 

X Ibid., p. 405. “To gird on night” is an Arab phrase for “daring 
the dangers of the night.” 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


139 


Again, another poem on Blood-revenge in the same col- 
lection ends with the words — 

“ Vengeance have I taken fully 
For my father and forefather, 

Nor in aught betrayed the household 
Which my shoulders must sustain.” * 

This prominence of communal sentiment should prevent 
us from picturing the chiefs of an Arab clan as corre- 
sponding to the knights of medieval Europe. The Arab’s 
sense of honour has been compared with the feelings of 
medieval chivalry ; Antar has been called the Bayard of 
Pagan Arabia ; and the Arabs of the days of Ignorance 
(that is, before the Prophet’s birth) have been described 
as the forerunners of our Western chivalry. In all this 
there is but a grain of truth. No doubt the Arabs in 
Spain and during the Crusades often supplied models of 
chivalrous deportment to European knights. But, in the 
first place, the old clan feelings of the Arabs underwent 
great changes during the Mohammedan conquests, and 
under the military organisation such conquests required. 
Feelings of honour resembling those of the German 
gefolge towards their military chief were developed and 
tended more and more to take the place of clan ties. 
Moreover, without some such loosening of these ties, 
without some such expansion of Arab sentiments as these 
conquering hosts brought about, it is hard to see how the 
common creed of Islam could have subdued the tribal 
antipathies with which it had a long and troublesome 
contest. But these poems of Blood-revenge display 
feelings of duty and honour altogether older than the 
chivalry of Christian knight or Moslem soldier, just in 
this, that clan kinship— not military service, or nation- 
ality, or universal religion — is still the bond of social 
union. In fact, it was military combination for purposes 
* Ham., pp. 487-407. 


140 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of conquest which almost everywhere broke down the old 
communal organisations, created distinctions of rank and 
property before which the clansmen often have sunk into 
serfs, and ultimately displaced sentiments of kinship by 
mere ties of local contiguity and self-interest. 

The communal character of Arab honour is therefore 
to be carefully distinguished from any bonds of military 
service ; and the poetry of Blood-revenge illustrates the 
distinction more accurately perhaps than any other. To 
another and final example of such poetry we accordingly 
turn — the Mo’allaqah of Zuheyr. This poem has been 
excellently translated by Mr. C. J. Lyall,* and wherever 
the exact words are offered we shall avail ourselves of 
Mr. Lyall’s translation in the following sketch of its con- 
tents : — The pasture-lands which the tribesmen leave at 
the end of spring are deserted, and over the camping 
ground of Umm Aufa’s tents — those “black lines that 
speak no word in the stony plains ” — roam “ the large-eyed 
kine, and the deer pass to and fro.” Umm Aufa was the 
poet’s wife, whom one day in an angry mood he had 
divorced ; since then he had repented and prayed her to 
return, but she would not. Here where her tents had 
stood he stands and gazes — twenty years have passed 
since last he saw the spot — hard was it to find again “ the 
black stones in order ranged in the place where the pot 
was set, and the trench, t like a cistern’s root, with its 
sides unbroken still.” 

Then the poet turns to the praises of the makers of 
peace for the clans of ‘Abs and Dubyan, and swears, “ by 
the Holy House which worshippers circle round,” the 
Ka‘beli, that the work of peacemaking is good. “ Busily 
wrought they for peace when the kin had been rent in 

* Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal , 1878. 

t Dug round the tent to receive the rain. 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


141 


twain, and its friendship sunk in blood. Ye healed ‘Abs’ 
and Dubyan’s breach when the twain were well-nigh 
spent, and between them the deadly perfume of Menshim * 
was working hate. Ye said, ‘ If we set our hands to 
Peace, base it broad and firm by the giving of gifts and 
fair words of friendship, all will be well/ . . . The 
wounds of the kindred were healed with hundreds of 
camels good ; he paid them forth, troop by troop, who 
had no part in the crime. Kin paid them forth to kin as 
a debt due from friend to friend, and they spilt not 
between them as much as a cupper’s cupful of blood.” 

Then the tribes are exhorted to keep faithfully their 
pact of peace. “Ho! carry my message true to the 
tribesmen together leagued and Dubyan — Have ye sworn 
all that ye took upon you to swear? War is not aught 
but what ye know well and have tasted oft ; not of her 
are the tales ye tell a doubtful or idle thing. . . . She 
will grind you as grist of the mill that falls on the skin 
beneath ; year by year shall her womb conceive, and the 
fruit thereof shall be twins.” After this reference to the 
deadly nature of tribal feud the poet tells the deed of 
Hoseyn, son of Damdam, how he slew his foe while the 
kins were making peace. “ Yea, verily good is the kin 
and unmeet the deed of wrong Hoseyn, son of Damdam, 
wrought against them, a murder foul! He hid deep 
within his heart his bloody intent, nor told to any his 
purpose till the moment to do was come. ... So he 
slew; no alarm he raised where the tents stood peace- 
fully, though there in their midst the Vulture-mother f 
had entered in to dwell with a lion fierce, a bulwark for 

* Said to refer to an Arab custom of plunging hands into a bowl of 
perfume when swearing to fight to the death. Hence, “ to bray the per- 
fume of Menshim ” (said to have been a seller of perfume in Mekkeh) 
became a proverbial expression for deadly strife. 

t Death. 


142 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


men in fight, a lion with angry mane npbristled, sharp 
tooth and claw, fearless ; when one wrongs him, he sets 
him to Vengeance straight, unfaltering ; when no wrong 
lights on him, ’tis he that wrongs.” 

So the wars break out afresh and more blood is spilled, 
and the Gheydh clan, though themselves without blame, 
pay from their herds. “ They pastured their camels 
athirst, until, when the time was ripe, they drove them to 
pools all cloven with weapons and plashed with blood. . . . 
But their lances — by thy life — were guilty of none that 
fell ; Nehik’s son died not by them ; nor had they in 
Naufal’s death part or share, nor by their hands did 
Wahab lie slain, nor by them fell el-Mukhazzem’s son. 
Yet for each of these that died did they pay the price of 
blood — good camels unblemished that climb in a row by 
the upland road to where dwells a kin of great heart, 
whose word is enough to shield whom they shelter when 
peril comes in a night of fierce strife and storm ; yea, 
noble are they ! The seeker of Vengeance gains not 
from them the blood of his foe.” The poem terminates 
with reflections on life and conduct, in the manner of the 
Hebrew mdshal, or proverbial maxim ; the poet has seen 
the Dooms “ trample men, as a blind beast ; ” and the 
fellowship of the clan is the only safeguard. 

“ Who gathers not friends by help in many a case of need 

is torn by the blind beast’s teeth or trodden beneath its foot. . . . 

And he who is lord of wealth, and niggardly with his hand 

alone is left by his kin ; naught have they for him but blame. . . . 

Who seeks far away from his kin for housing takes foe for friend.” 

Blood-revenge in various forms of early song is easily 
discovered by any wanderer in the uplands of early litera- 
ture. Even long after he has descended to homes of 
poetry in which a note of clan sentiment is rarely heard, 
he may be startled by the old sound among the streets of 
cities like an echo from the life of the wild woods, the 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


143 


desert, the haunts of the barbarous communes. Such are 
the words which suddenly voice the spirit of Blood- 
revenge in the speech of Ajax * — 

“Ay, for a murdered brother or son have we taken the wehrgeld ; 

So in his commune stayeth the murderer, much having paid down ; 

So the avenger’s passion is soothed by the gift of the wehrgeld.” 

And among the Christian associations of Beoivulf the same 
feelings of old clanship break out in a curious mixture of 
the spiritual and material ; 

“ Spake the son of Ecgtheow, 

* Clearly was our dread encounter, 

Higelac, a time of strife, 

On the plain where Grendel harried 
Sige-Scyldings sick of life. 

All their griefs have I avenged 
So that Greudel’s kindred may 
Ne’er on earth, however long-lived, 

Boast about that twilight-fray.’ ” f 

§ 39. Closely allied in spirit to these poems of Blood- 
revenge are the death-songs of clansmen; here, again, 
there is scope for the expression of such personal feelings 
as do not conflict with clan duties. Among the many 
examples of such poems we shall select two, which, as 
coming from the most distant parts of the world, and 
belonging to widely different conditions of climate and 
race, may be aptly compared — the death-song of the Arab 
‘Abd Yaghuthjt and that of the famous Bagnar Lodbrok 
thrown by Ella into a dungeon full of vipers. 

The song of Lodbrok partly sketches the hero’s past 
victories, and partly describes the sentiments with which 
he meets his death ; it is only with the latter part that 
we are at present concerned. The chant of death is put 
dramatically enough into the dying hero’s mouth, and 
would no doubt have been wonderfully effective as 
delivered by the Scald. Some of the concluding stanzas 

* Iliad, ix. G32 sqq. t Beoiculf, 2005 sqq. X Agl&ni, xv. 75. 


144 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


may be here quoted as illustrating the spirit of the 
poem. 

“ Ay, we have struck with the sword ! 

Each of us follows his fate ; 

None can escape the Nornes.* 

But never had I believed 
That Ella should take my life 
When, to sate the falcons of blood, 

We launched our ships on the waves, 

And far in the Scottish gulfs 
Gave to the wolves their prey. 

“Ay, we have struck with the sword! 

Ever I joy as I think 
How tables are ready for feasting 
In the hall of Balder’s father ; f 
Soon shall we drink of the beer 
From the branching, bending horns. 

In Fiolner’s t splendid palace 
No hero groans for death ; 

Nor ever with cries of anguish 
Shall I reach the hall of Vidrer.J 

“ Ay, we have struck with the sword ! 

The latest moment comes ; 

The raging serpents tear me ; 

In my heart the viper coils. 

Soon shall the dart of Vidrer $ 

In Ella’s heart be buried. 

My sons shall rage for their father’s death, 

Warriors brave they shall never rest.” 

Ah ! all Asloga’s § sons would fight to the death if they 
only knew their father’s tortures. Has he not fought 
battles, fifty and one, “by the messenger-arrow an- 
nounced ” ? “ But the Ases come to call me — my death 

is not for weeping. Yea, would I die ! The Dises, 
Odin’s messengers, invite me to the Heroes’ Hall. 
Gladly I go to drink on a throne by the Ases’ side ; 

‘The hours of my life are finished — 

I die with a smile on my lips ! ’ ” 

The sensual pleasures of Lodbrok’s rude paradise are 

* The Parcse of the North. t Balder was the second son of Odin. 

X Names of Odin. § Wife of Ragnar. 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


145 


perhaps the most striking thought in these lines. Like 
the future blessedness of the Egyptian,'* Lodbrok’s 
paradise is merely the best of his earthly good things, 
which in the cold regions of the North are scant and 
coarse enough. But though there is no thought of future 
life as a moral sanction, though personality has not yet 
passed beyond a sense of animal pains and pleasures, 
Lodbrok’s song sets the person of the chief in the front 
and thrusts the kinsmen well into the background ; and 
we could readily imagine the Heroes’ Hall developed into 
the privileged paradise of the chiefs, while the body of the 
kinsmen, like the common herd in Mexico, remained in 
some dreary realm of Mictlan. Whether it was that clan- 
ship lost much of its communal spirit during the expedi- 
tions of the sea-robbers, devotion to the chief taking the 
place of kinship ties, or that Northern conditions of soil 
and climate never permitted the same closeness of clan 
co-operation and sentiments as the sunny lands of the 
South, Lodbrok’s song is pitched in a more personal key 
than most early x\rab poems. Ideas of fate and revenge, 
common enough in Arab poetry, are thus personalised. 
Moreover, in the Arab death-song the idea of future 

* “ The blessed is represented as enjoying an existence similar to that 
which he had led upon earth. He lias the use of all his limbs, he eats 
and drinks and satisfies every one of his physical wants exactly as in his 
former life. His bread is made of the corn of Pe, a famous town of Egypt, 
and the beer he drinks is made from the red corn of the Nile. The flesh 
of cattle and fowl is given to him, and refreshing waters are poured out 
to him under the boughs of sycamores which shade him from the heat. 
Tho cool breezes of the north wind breathe upon him. . . . Fields 
also are allotted to him in the lands of Aarru and Hotep, and he 
cultivates them” (Hibbert Lectures for 1879, p. 180). If, as M. le Page 
Renouf here adds, “it is characteristic of an industrious and agricultural 
population that part of the bliss of a future state should consist in such 
operations as ploughing and hoeing, sowing and reaping, rowing on the 
canals and collecting the harvests,” the Hebrew SJieol, or gathering-place 
of the clans, and the Scandinavian Warriors’ Hall, or paradise of the chiefs, 
are no less interesting reflections of social conditions in ideas of a future 
life. 


146 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


happiness is conspicuously absent. ‘Abd Yaghuth 
knows nothing of a heroes’ paradise ; his face is turned 
not to the shadow-world of the clan which he is about 
to enter, but to the comrades who drank with him in 
Nejran “ who shall never see him more ; ” even now he 
would gladly purchase life from the Blood-avengers with 
all his wealth ; but, alas, it is no use, he must “ hear no 
more the voice of the herdsmen who shout for their camels 
in the distant grazing-grounds.” 

‘Abd Yaghuth has been taken captive, and ‘Ismek 
son of Ubehr of Teym has carried him to his home, where 
the captive is about to be slain in revenge for the death 
of en-No‘man son of Jessas, the leader of Temim. Then 
said he, “ 0 ye sons of Teym, let me die as befits one 
noble.” “ And how wouldst thou die ? ” asked Tsmeh. 
“Give me wine to drink and let me sing my death-song.” 
“ So be it,” said ‘Ismeh, and plied him with wine and 
cut one of his veins. Then, as his life ebbed, and ‘Ismeh’s 
two sons standing by began to upbraid him, this was the 
death-song of ‘Abd Yaghuth : “ Upbraid me not, ye twain! 
Shame is it enough for me to be as I am : no gain in 
upbraiding to you or me. Know ye not that in reproach 
there is little that profits men ? It was not my wont to 
blame my brother when I was free. O rider, if thou 
lightest on those men who drank with me in Nejran 
aforetime, say, ‘Ye shall never see him more!’ — Abu 
Kerib and those twin el-Eyhem, the twain of them, and 
Qeys of el- Yemen who dwells in the uplands of Hadra- 
maut. May God requite with shame my people for el- 
Kulab — those of them of pure race, and the others born 
of slaves ! Had it been my will there had borne me far 
away from their horse a swift mare, behind whom the 
black steeds flag in a slackening throng : but it was my 
will to shield the men of your fathers’ house, and the 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


147 


spears all missed the man who stood as his fellows’ shield. 
The matron of ‘Abd-Shems laughed as she saw me led 
in bonds, as though she had seen before no captive of 
el-Yemen ; but one knows — Muleykeh my wife — that 
time was when I stood forth a lion in fight, whether men 
bore against me or I led on. I said to them when they 
bound my tongue with a leathern thong — f O kinsmen of 
Teym, I pray you, leave me my tongue yet free ! 0 kins- 

men of Teym, ye hold me fast : treat me gently then ; the 
brother ye lost was not the equal in place of me. And, 
if ye must slay me, let me die at least as a lord ; and if 
ye will let me go, take in ransom all my wealth.’ | Is 
it truth, ye servants of God — I shall hear no more the 
voice | of herdsmen who shout for their camels in the 
distant grazing-grounds ? | Yea, many a beast did I 
slay and many a camel urge | to her swiftest, and journey 
steadfast where no man dared to go ; | and ofttimes I slew 
for my fellows my camel at the feast | and ofttimes I rent 
my robe in twain for two singing girls, | and ofttimes 
withstood a host like locusts that swept on me | with 
my hand alone when all the lances on me were turned. | 
Now am I as though I never had mounted a noble steed, | 
or called to my horsemen — ‘ Charge ! give our footmen 
breathing space ! ’ | or bought the full skin of wine for 
much gold, or shouted loud j to my comrades stout — 

4 Heap high the blaze of our beacon fire ! ’ ” * 

§ 40. But, beside the songs which have come down to 
us reeking of bloodshed, we have early Arab poems in 
which the personal character of the clansman is less 
violently expressed. Thus in the Mo‘allaqah of Lebid 
the poet draws a picture of the clansman’s generosity 
which reminds us of Antar, but is again to be distin- 

* In order to convey some idea of the Arab metre ( tciwil , second. form) 
Mr. Lyall’s version is here retained, his lines being also marked in tho 
latter part of the poem. 


148 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


guished from medieval chivalry by its communal rather 
than personal spirit ; it is, in fact, the generosity of a group 
rather than that of an individual, of a brotherhood of 
kinsmen alike noble and not of an isolated knight. The 
lines occur after a graphic description of the camel (to 
which we may elsewhere refer), and have been rendered as 
follows by Mr. Lyall in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of 
Bengal for 1877. “ There sought refuge by my tent-ropes, 
every wretched one clad in scanty rags and wasted like 
the camel by his master’s grave. And they fill brimful 
with meat, when the winds are blowing shrill, great 
bowls of broth in which their fatherless ones come to 
drink. Verily we of ‘Amir, when the tribes are met 
together, there wants not of us a chief to lead in the 
doing of a noble deed, or a divider to portion out to the 
tribe its due, or a prince to give less or more as he deems 
right and good in his headship ; or a generous man who 
helps men with his bounty freehanded, a gainer of all good 
gifts and one who takes them by force. For he comes of 
a stock to whom their fathers laid down the way — and 
every people has its own way and its leader therein.” 

It is interesting to contrast this picture of the open- 
handed Bedouin with another Semitic poem, in which, 
however, the desert is in the background and city life in 
the front. Ibn Khaldoun tells us that “ writing in towns 
reaches a degree of beauty greater or less in proportion to 
the progress men have made in civilisation; so we see that 
the nomads for the most part can neither read nor write.” 
This difference between the culture of the towns — pur- 
chased by division of labour and new distinctions of pro- 
perty and rank — and the rude freedom of the desert was 
deeply experienced by the Hebrews ; their ideal life was 
clearly that of the pastoral tribe, the Hebrew state of 
nature so vividly symbolised by the preference of Abel the 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


149 


shepherd over Cain the tiller of the soil, and indirectly 
expressed in the curse of labour ; but agricultural villages 
with their periodic allotments of land, and towns or larger 
villages with their elders ( zeqenim ), are the foremost figures 
in the practical life of Israel. So, when we turn to the 
Book of Job, the most Arab of Hebrew poems, we find 
that we have passed from the associations of the desert to 
those of the city, and that feelings of communal gene- 
rosity have been largely lost in the transition to that 
settled life in which the higgling of the market (to use 
Adam Smith’s phrase) must soon come to be based on 
individual self-interest. “When I leave the gate of the 
citadel ( qereth ) in the open space I set my seat ; grey- 
beards rose and stood ; princes stayed their words and 
placed their hands upon their mouths ; the voices of the 
nobles ceased and their tongues clave to the roofs of their 
mouths.” Here in the settled community, with its social 
grades dependent largely on the possession of wealth, its 
trading spirit and competitions in miniature, the better- 
ing of the outcasts is not an act of Bedouin generosity, 
but the rise of upstarts whose early poverty may be cast 
in their teeth as a disgrace. “ Now they of fewer days 
laugh against me, whose fathers I disdained to set with 
the dogs of my flock. — Ay, what use to me was the 
strength of their hands ? Age lay dead upon them. 
Lean for want and hunger they were gnawing in the 
desert, yesternight in waste and ruin ; they were cutters 
of orachs by the bushes, with the roots of juniper for food. 
They are driven from among us (shouts are raised against 
them as against the thief) to settle in the horrid beds of 
torrents, caverns in the earth, and crags. They bray like 
hungry asses in the bushes, under nettles are they clanned* 

* Yesuppachu ; tin's use of s&pliach should be compared with shdphcich , 
from which mishpdchali, the familiar Hebrew expression for “elan,” is 
derived. 


150 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


together. Sons of folly, sons without a name too, they 
are too afflicted to live. But now am I become their 
song of satire, ay, to them have I become a byword.” * 

Thus in the city old ties of kinship and the generous 
feelings of the desert were to be spoiled by that huckster- 
ing spirit of the market to which the Bedouin has ever 
shown the contempt of Cyrus. Action from self-interest, 
the very gospel of townsmen, was of all things most dis- 
tasteful to clan character, for the true clansman is always 
ready to sacrifice self for communal interests, even where 
he believes the conduct of his kinsmen to be ill advised. 
An excellent example of such self-sacrifice is to be found 
in a poem of the Hamaseh attributed to Dureyd, son of es- 
Simmeh.f The poet has warned both Arid and the men 
who went Arid’s way ; he has said, “ Think, even now two 
thousand are on your track;” yet his 'warning goes un- 
heeded. “But when they would hearken not, I followed 
their road, though I knew well they were fools and that 
I walked not in Wisdom’s way — For am I not one of 
Gkaziyyeh ? And if they err, I err with my house ; and 
if Ghaziyyeh go right, so I. I read them my rede one 
day beneath where the sandhills fail; the morrow at 
noon they saw' my counsel as I had seen.” For a shout 
arises, a voice, “ The horsemen have slain a warrior ! ” 
“ Is it Abdallah ? ” cries the poet, and springs to the 
warrior’s side. “ The spears had riddled his body through, 
as a weaver on outstretched web plies deftly the sharp- 
toothed comb ; ” and his champion, whose counsel was 
yesterday set aside, now stands “as a camel with fear in 
her heart, and thinks is her youngling slain.” 

This readiness to share foreseen disaster with the 

* Job xxx. 1-10. 

t Ilam., pp. 377-380. For Mr. Ly all's translation in full, sec Jour. As. 
Soc. of Bengal, 1881. 


PERSONAL CLAN TOETRY. 


151 


elan, even where personal forethought might have averted 
it, is an expression of communal sympathy curiously con- 
trasting with the personal lyric for which our modern 
literatures have made such wide room. The Arab knows 
the folly of his clansmen, but he will die by their collec- 
tive folly rather than live by his individual wisdom ; and 
so the poem goes on, “ I fought as a man who gives his 
life for his brother’s life, who knows that his time is short, 
that Death’s doom above him hangs. But, know ye if 
Abdallah be gone and his place a void ; no weakling 
unsure of hand, no holder-back was he ! ” 

But it would be a mistake to suppose that early Arab 
poetry contains no indications of personal quarrels with 
the clan, that the clansman’s self-sacrificing devotion was 
never weakened by any sense of injustice experienced at 
the hands of his kindred. Lest the reader should carry 
away any such mistaken impression, we shall here offer 
one more specimen from the Hamdseh which will illus- 
trate the conflict of personal with communal action ; and 
it is worth noticing how the subject of the dispute is the 
defence of personal property by the clansman’s kindred. 

Certain men of the Benu Sheyban had fallen upon 
the herds of Qureyt, son of Uneyf, of the Bel-‘Ambar, 
and carried off thirty of his camels. So he asked for 
help of his kin the Bel-‘Ambar, but they helped him not. 
Then he betook himself to the men of Mazin ; and a 
company of these went forth with him and drove away 
a hundred camels of the herds of Sheyban, and gave 
them to him and guarded him until he came to his tribe. 
Upon this incident the following poem, which is the 
first of the Hamdseh , was composed. 

“ Had I been a son of Mazin, 

Never had my herds been ta’en 
By the sons of Dhuhl of Sheyban, 

Sons of children of the dust. 


152 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Straightway to my help had risen 
Kinsmen of a heavy hand, 

Smiters good when help is needed 
And the feeble bend to blows ; 

Men, when evil bares before them 
Gaping jaws of hindmost teeth, 

Gay to rush upon and meet him, 
joined in bands or e’en alone. 

When a brother in his trouble 
Tells the story of his wrong, 

They are not llie men to question 
* And to ask for proofs of truth. 

But my people, though their numbers 
Be not small, are good for naught 
’Gainst whatever evil cometh 
Howsoever light it be ; 

They are men who with forgiveness 
Meet the wrong their foes have done. 

Men who meet the deeds of evil 
Kind of heart and full of love ! 

Just as though the Lord created 
Them among the sons of men. 

Them alone, to fear before Him 
And beside them no man else. 

Would I had instead for clansmen 
Kinsmen who, when forth they ride. 

Swiftly strike their blows and hardly, 

Or on horse or camel borne ! ” 

§ 41. This peculiar objectiveness of personality in 
clan life will enable us to see in their true light certain 
characteristics of early poetry which have been con- 
stantly misinterpreted by the sentiments or philosophy 
of modem life. “Poetry,” says Victor Hugo in his 
famous preface to Cromwell * has three ages, each of 
which corresponds to an epoch of society — the ode, the 
epic, the drama. Primitive ages are lyrical, ancient 
times are epical, modern are dramatic. The ode sings 
of eternity, the epic celebrates history, the drama paints 
life. The character of the first is naivete, of the second 
simplicity, of the third truth. The rhapsodists mark the 
transition from lyric to epic poets just as the romancers 
mark that from epic to dramatic. With the second 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


153 


epoch historians appear ; chroniclers and critics with the 
third. The personages of the ode are colossal — Adam, 
Cain, Noah; those of the epics are giants — Achilles, 
Atreus, Orestes ; those of the drama are men — Hamlet, 
Macbeth, Othello. The life of the ode is ideal, that of 
the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this 
triple poetry springs from three grand sources — the 
Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects 
of thought at different eras of man and society. Here 
are its three faces — youth, manhood, old age. Examine 
a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse , and 
you will always reach the same fact — the lyric poets 
before the epic, the epic before the dramatic.” Nor is 
this all. The supposed law of literary progress extends 
beyond the domain of social and individual humanity, 
and the same triple aspect of progress may be observed 
in the magnificent phenomena of physical nature. “ It 
might be consistent to add that everything in Nature 
and in life assumes these three phrases of progress — the 
lyric, the epic, the dramatic — since everything has its 
birth, its action, and its death. If it were not absurd to 
intermingle relations fancied by the imagination with 
strict deductions of reason, a poet might say that sun- 
rise, for example, is a hymn, noonday a brilliant epic, 
sunset a sombre drama in which day and night, life and 
death, struggle for the mastery.” 

All this is something more than that abuse of 
words — “ lyric,” “ epic,” “ dramatic ” — below which there 
lurks so often an abuse of reasoning ; it is something 
more than an imaginative will-o’-the-wisp mistaken for 
the steady light of science ; it is nothing less than an 
inversion of the true order in which the personality of 
man has been developed. Just as Rousseau’s ideal state 
of nature dissolves into a dream as soon as w r e recognise 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


1M 


the fact that communal groups of kinsmen, not free 
individuals, are the starting-points of social progress, so 
the poetic fancies of Victor Hugo disappear into dream- 
land at the touch of historical facts which prove the 
“colossal” individualism of his “ primitive ” ages to be 
a myth. Hugo, in fact, seems to waver between two 
theories alike unhistorical. Partially he seems to retain 
the Platonic fancy that personal character is not essen- 
tially different in different stages of social evolution, that 
the range of social life within which the individual acts 
and thinks does not profoundly affect his character, and 
that consequently “ lyric ” means the same bundle of 
facts and ideas for the clan, the city, the nation, the 
world-empire. Partially, on the other hand, he seems 
inclined to adopt the old religious and poetic theory of 
human degradation from a race of gods and heroes, as if 
individual character (and physique, no doubt) at first 
“colossal” had gradually sunk into the more moderate 
dimensions of a giant — the Titans reduced to Nirnrods, 
let us suppose — and finally narrowed down into the 
average stature and age of men as we find them. But 
the main source of Victor Hugo’s brilliant errors is the 
same as that of Bousseau’s fallacies — the assumption of 
individual freedom, objective and subjective, under social 
conditions which by their communal narrowness of 
thought and sympathy and action, their communal re- 
straints on personal independence by innumerable chains 
of custom, prevented any but the weakest and most 
material sense of personality. Hugo’s theory of “ lyric,” 
“epic,” “dramatic” progression is, from one standpoint, 
not unlike Carlyle’s Hero-worship; and neither Hugo 
nor Carlyle seems to have discovered the profound differ- 
ences which separate the merely objective and animal 
personality of primitive groups from the subjective 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


155 


depths of highly developed individualism. As for 
Hugo’s fancy that the critical terms “ epic,” “ dramatic,” 
“lyric,” may be viewed apart from the conditions under 
which they arose as marks of literary distinctions univer- 
sally discoverable, it would be easy to show that the 
meanings of these words changed in the social history 
of Greece itself, the country of their origin, and that, far 
from being marks of universal ideas common to every 
literature, their meanings have continually altered in the 
mouths of the European peoples and critics who have 
used them. But it rather concerns our present purpose 
to observe the unhistorical criticism which overlooks the 
profoundly significant facts that neither the individualism 
of the “lyric” author nor that of the human character 
he celebrates, in truth few of the personal feelings 
of the modern “ lyric,” are possible in the really primi- 
tive conditions of social life which Victor Hugo and 
many in his company are accustomed to label “ lyrical.” 
The “lyric” of modern life sees all things, expresses all 
things, in the thoughts and feelings of a personal being 
connected, indeed, with far wider circles of kinship than 
it entered into the heart of primitive man to conceive, 
but only connected by vague ties of infinite and incom- 
prehensible destiny. The so-called “ lyric ” of early life 
sees all things, expresses all things in the thoughts and 
feelings of little groups narrowly exclusive in their ties 
of common obligation, but feeling the reality of such ties 
with a force which now can scarcely be conceived. How, 
then, it may be asked, have such misrepresentations of 
the spirit of early literature become so common in our 
European criticism ? 

We have previously alluded to certain causes of such 
misrepresentation. In our modern European life indi- 
vidual character has so long occupied the foreground, 
8 


156 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


so strongly have individualised passion and sentiment 
become associated with literary art and criticism either 
distinctively our own or inherited from Athens and 
Eome, that only very recently and under the influence 
of a new uprising of corporate life have we cared to 
remember that personality in primitive is very different 
from personality in civilized communities. Moreover, 
we have been long content to regard the beginnings of 
literature as socially ascending little farther than the 
feudal castle, and for the most part dependent upon the 
rise of monarchical courts or of polished city common- 
wealths such as those of Greece and Italy. To penetrate 
beyond such forms of social life, to reach conceptions of 
personality quite different from those which the lord’s 
castle, the city, or the court have produced, to even 
explain survivals from the earlier types of social and 
individual life in these later organisations, has been up 
to the present the tentative work of a few scholars who 
have scarcely affected popular views of literature at all. 
Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult even for scholars 
possessing a thoroughly historical turn of mind to grasp 
facts so subtle in their nature as the historical changes 
of human personality. One illustration will suffice to 
show the difficulty with which even profoundly historical 
minds have reached the conception of types of person- 
ality dependent on the changing forms of social organi- 
sation. 

Montesquieu, in his Essay on Taste , left unfinished 
at his death, saw clearly enough the importance of the 
senses as sources of our ideas of the beautiful neglected 
by Platonic idealists. Deriding such idealism as con- 
verting internal perceptions into real and positive quali- 
ties, he observed how different our emotions and feelings 
would have been had we possessed one organ of sense 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


157 


more or less, or if, possessing the same number of senses, 
our sight or hearing had been greatly different in their 
powers. Other species of poetry and eloquence would 
have arisen ; the plans of architects would have intro- 
duced fewer ornaments and more uniformity had our 
sight been more feeble and confused ; and had our sense 
of hearing been constituted like that of many other 
animals, most of our musical instruments would have 
required a different construction or modulation. “ Hence, 
the perfection of the arts consisting in their presenting 
to us their respective objects in such a manner as will 
render them as agreeable and striking as possible, a 
different constitution of our nature from the present 
would necessarily require a change in the present state 
of the arts adapted to the change which that new con- 
stitution would occasion in the means of enjoyment.” 
Had Montesquieu paused to ask what he intended by 
" our nature ,” he might have found that the “ nature” 
of which he spoke was a certain average humanity, a 
certain type of character which by no means results from 
the mere possession of the human senses. He would 
have found that this type is largely the outcome of 
peculiar social conditions ; indeed, he himself admits — 
without making much use of the admission — that, beside 
the senses and intellect, “ those impressions and preju- 
dices which are the result of certain institutions, customs, 
and habits ” have moulded our ideas of taste. Nay, more, 
he would have discovered that even the senses them- 
selves, sight and hearing for example, possessed a far 
higher degree of average acuteness, though an inferior 
degree of msthetic discrimination, among American 
Indian clansmen of the prairies than in the average 
Frenchman or Englishman of his day. Finally, if he 
had compared together the music of France and China, 


158 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


or the languages of these countries as indices to average 
discrimination of sounds, he would also have discovered 
that the type of humanity he had in view w r as only one 
among many diverse types, and that his statical view of 
human sensations and their effects on the arts would 
require to be supplemented by dynamical views of human 
development, and the effects of different social systems 
on music, sculpture, architecture, painting, literature. 

If one of the very founders of historical science experi- 
enced such difficulty in rising above the associations of per- 
sonality to which he had been himself accustomed, we need 
not be surprised that few have yet grasped the historical 
fact that types of personality have come into being and 
disappeared with different stages of social evolution. 
But neither should we allow the imperfect philosophy 
of a Montesquieu or the poetic fancies of a Victor Hugo 
to stand between us and the light. 

§ 42. Had space permitted, we might here pause to 
trace the rise of those social conditions which permitted 
an epic poetry of personal prowess and kingly descent. 
We might show that such conditions are to be found in 
the decadence of communal life before the growth of 
personal property and personal rank. It is when the 
head men of the clan have assumed the privileges of 
hereditary chiefs, and come to stand alone in the golden 
sunset of a divine ancestry once common to the entire 
group, when the mass of clansmen have sunk into simple 
freemen or even serfs, and the chiefs men stand apart 
from the common folk as their lord’s comitatus , that both 
the choral and the personal poetry of the clan give way 
to the songs of the chiefs hall. Perhaps one of the 
earliest shapes of heroic poetry was the genealogical 
poem, familiar to students of Celtic literature, blending 
the communal personality of the clan with the individual 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


159 


heroism of the chief, and drawing no clear distinction 
between his exploits and those of the kinsmen in general. 
Old songs of eponymous clan-ancestors would meet such 
beginnings of epic poetry half-way, and the glory of the 
clan’s ideal parentage would be easily transferred to the 
personal ancestry of the chief. It has even been pro- 
posed to find the roots of epic poetry in hymns of ancestor- 
worship similar to those of the Shih King. It has been 
suggested that the oldest epic poems were little else than 
hymns extolling the deeds of the dead at the celebration 
of ancestral sacrifices; and wherever ancestral worship 
has possessed such influence as in China, we may be sure 
that there was little scope for an epic of any description 
save through sentiments of such worship. But without 
laying undue stress on the fact that the Chinese, so far 
as their literature is at present known to European 
scholars, possess nothing which can be said to resemble 
an epic poem, and even admitting that ancestral worship 
of great families may have contributed something to epic 
poetry, we must remember that heroic poetry derives 
its main inspiration from individualised life. Wherever 
physical and social conditions have allowed the clan or 
family to maintain their strength, we need not expect 
such poetry. Hence its absence in early Rome as in 
China ; and if it be replied that India, with its caste- 
system and village communes, offers us specimens of the 
epic, we may reply that the Ramarjana and Mahabharata 
are rather stories of the gods than celebrations of human 
heroism, and that their very tissue is the handiwork of a 
priestly caste. 

But space we have not to enter the lists of epic 
criticism in which so many belted knights of the pen 
have fought and fallen. We prefer to leave our Homeric 
battle of the books in the hands of specialists, merely 


160 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


observing that up to tlie present the wordy war has 
savoured rather too much of the modern study and 
blotting-pad, and rather too little of early social life 
in Greece. If our laborious German scholars would 
only devote a little spare time to the comparison of the 
social conditions under which the poetry of heroism has 
flourished in different countries and ages, we might know 
more about the beginnings of the epic than we are likely 
to learn from any number of textual emendations and 
verbal skirmishings. 

It would have been part of our treatment of the epic 
to have traced or attempted to trace the changes through 
which the makers of literature passed in the social tran- 
sition from communal to personal life; for the rise of 
personal authorship is one of the main literary effects 
of the decadence of clan life. So long as dance and music 
and mimicry form as integral parts of the literary per- 
formance as the words said or sung, property in song is 
almost inconceivable ; and, long after priestly castes had 
commenced to create a kind of religious literature of 
hymns and legal ordinances belonging to the sacerdotal 
oligarchy, the conception of personal property in litera- 
ture seems to have remained practically unknown. To 
examples of communal authorship and apparent survivals 
from it we have previously referred ; and, if space per- 
mitted, we might have treated the universal prevalence 
of verse in early literature as closely connected with this 
communal song-making, or might have watched the 
gradual rise of prose as accompanying the development 
of personal freedom, and aided by that invention before 
which assonance and rime and metre ceased to perform 
the practical function of supporting the memory, and 
became ornaments of art — writing. But neither the 


PERSONAL CLAN POETRY. 


161 


changes in the status of early song-makers * nor the pro- 
gress of literary forms from verse to prose can here 
receive more than a passing notice. We prefer to devote 
the space at our command to a brief outline of the aspect 
which physical nature assumes under the eyes of clans- 
men. 

* Such changes in status were due to a great variety of causes. Thus, 
the introduction of writing reduced the value which recitation, with or 
without musical accompaniment, had possessed in days when this inven- 
tion was either unknown or little used. (Cf. Renan, on the Kasida , 
Hist, des langues Semtiqxies , p. 359, edit. 1878.) Another influence 
powerfully affecting the status of early song-makers is the growth of 
central government. By a statute of the thirty-ninth year of Elizabeth, 
for example, “minstrels wandering abroad ” are included among “ rogues, 
vagabonds, and sturdy beggars ” ; so low had the early song-maker of 
England sunk in the Elizabethan centralisation of force and culture. (Of. 
Percy, Essay on Ancient English Minstrels, prefixed to his Reliques, 
vol. i.) 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


1GZ 


CHAPTEE IV. 

THE CLAN AND NATURE. 

§ 43. Although Alexander yon Humboldt * and others 
after him have observed the influences of a great political 
union, such as that effected by the Eoman empire or 
that of Great Britain and her colonies, on human views 
of the physical world, no one, so far as the present writer 
is aware, has undertaken to trace the different aspects 
which Nature assumes for man under the varying and 
expanding forms of social organisation he has experienced. 
The studies of Montesquieu, to whom we owe so much as 
one great founder of truly historical inquiry in Europe, 
tended to treat social life too exclusively as the resultant 
of physical forces — climate, the nature of the soil, extent 
and character of sea-board, and the like. But though 
the physical conformation of the country they inhabit 
powerfully affects the commercial and political, the 
philosophical and artistic life of men, we must not forget 
that the structure of their social system, however de- 
pendent upon physical causes, supplies the aspects of 
Nature with certain lines peculiarly its own. Humboldt 

* Perhaps the best introduction for students beginning the interesting 
study of literature in its relations with Nature would be the section on 
Poetic Descriptions of Nature in Humboldt’s Cosmos, and the works of 
M. Victor de Laprade Le Sentiment de la Nature avant le Christianisme 
and Le Sentiment de la Nature chcz les Modernes. 


THE CLAN AND NATURE. 


163 


with great felicity compares the poetic descriptions of 
Nature left us by Indians and Persians, Hebrews and 
Arabs, Greeks and Romans, and the literatures of modern 
Europe. But his point of view, though not quite so 
passive as that of Montesquieu, though not directly 
intimating the creation of human ideas by physical 
forces, is that of the physical, not of the human, world. 
It is one thing to watch the effects of Indian or Italian 
scenery as they disclose themselves in Sanskrit or Italian 
poetry ; it is another to observe the different aspects 
under which the same physical environment presents 
itself to social groups differently organised. The latter 
is the study to which at present we propose to direct 
attention — the sentiment of Nature as dependent on 
social organisation, that of the clan in particular. 

We must at the outset carefully distinguish the two 
faces which early social conditions present — that of the 
clan and that of the chiefs hall, the communal poetry 
of the Hebrew or the Arab, and the heroic songs of 
Homeric aoidoi or of Saxon Scops. Nature presents her- 
self in different garb to the village community and the 
household of the chief. To the former she is the maker 
of the harvest, the bounteous giver or the offended with- 
holder of the corn and wine and oil ; the whole community 
lives in constant companionship with her, and (as the 
Hebrew when he spoke of sunrise as the sun’s “ going 
forth,” like man to his labour, and sunset as the sun’s 
“ coming in,” like man to his rest) transfer to her the 
associations of their agricultural life. To the household 
and retainers of the chief she is less interesting than the 
ancestor from whom the chief derives his divine lineage, 
or the deeds of martial prowess in which he and his 
immediate following take pride. The epic rhapsodist 
may, indeed, clothe his heroes in the dress of Nature’s 


164 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


godship, but the personality of his chief shines through. 
Hence, wherever the clan community falls under the 
domination of chiefs (as, in the absence of a strong 
priestly centralism, it has at least for a time almost 
always fallen), the powers of Nature are thrust into the 
background by divinities, or demi-gods, or heroes whose 
connection with the physical world is obscured by aristo- 
cratic associations ; wherever communal life has for any 
length of time held its own against the chiefs, the poetry 
of Nature, comparatively unhumanised, has been kept 
alive. 

In Homeric Greece and Saxon England the develop- 
ment of social unity found its main channel in the 
individual enterprise of military chiefs ; and the Scop of 
the mead-hall or Demodokus in the palace of Alkinous 
are the song-makers whom such a turn of social circum- 
stances brings to the front. In early Israel or Arabia 
before the Prophet the progress of social unity moves 
along another channel — that fusion of leaguered clans 
which in the Amphiktionic League looks out upon us 
like a survival from unsuccessful prehistoric efforts after 
Hellenic unity. In the poetry of Israel and Arabia, 
accordingly, Nature plays a more prominent part than 
in that of Homeric Greece or Saxon England. The 
point of view from which Nature is conceived is also 
different in these cases — she is the grand unity of the 
Hebrew and Arab, before which all social differences 
“are as dust that rises up and is lightly laid again;” 
she is the grand diversity of the Greek and Saxon, look- 
ing out from every place with a new face and a changed 
name, and a sympathy for none but her local friends. 
The same principle meets us in the poetry of India. 
Here Nature, too, predominates, not merely because the 
splendour of Indian scenery is passively reflected in the 


THE CLAN AND NATURE. 


165 


Indian hymns, epics, dramas, but because human life in 
India has been such as to make the social predominate 
over the individual factors, the Indian village community 
having always been the most stable institution of Indian 
life. Indian, like Hebrew, literature is full of the social 
sentiment of Nature, but knows little of the individual- 
ised Nature of Theocritus or Wordsworth. 

“Now sleeps the deep, now sleep the wandering winds, 

But in my heart the anguish sleepeth not,” * 

sings the Greek idyllist ; but the song of his own heart 
outsings through the stillness of Nature. 

“Yon cloud with that long purple cleft 
Brings fresh into my mind 
A day like this which I have left 
Full thirty years behind,” 

sings the English poet of Nature ; but the cloud bears no 
rainbow of social hope, it is a private sign of personal 
recollections. 

§ 44. In order to reach the point of view from which 
the clan regards Nature we must remember the one 
grand characteristic of clan thought which has been 
previously explained at some length. This is the want 
of personality in any sense resembling the modern. Just 
as the responsibility of a child for the deeds of genera- 
tions buried long before it was born does not appear 
irrational to men who have no clear notion of personal 
intention, of personal as distinct from communal life, so 
in dealing with the phenomena of Nature — wind and 
cloud, rain and thunder, sun, moon, stars — the names 
given by such primitive minds and expressing for the 
most part ideas of human action are not really individual 

* Idyll ii. 38— 

ijvlde <rtya ptXv tt6vt os , ffiyuvTi 5 ’ arjTar 
a 5* f/xaov aiy§ arlpvwv ivToodtv avia 


166 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


names. The Hebrew and Teuton heard without surprise 
that the eponymous ancestor of the human race was 
“ Man ” ( adam , mannas ), because the difference between 
a general idea and an individual name was not yet con- 
ceived with any distinctness, because, in fact, the sense 
of personality was not sufficiently developed to admit of 
such distinctness. In the same way the phenomena of 
Nature are expressed in the terms of human existence, 
as it was then conceived, without either the desire or the 
ability to personify Nature in our modern sense. The 
early confusion of human and physical existence is, in 
fact, only an extension of that confusion of personal with 
social existence which so strikingly characterises the 
clan age. Both proceed from a condition of thought in 
which personal and collective, subjective and objective, 
abstract and concrete forms of being are confused ; and 
the source of this confusion is to be largely discovered in 
the communal organisation of early social life. 

Viewed in this light we may regard the work of 
myth-making as the peculiar function of the clan age ; 
and the relations of the clan to myth are alike visible in 
the social and the physical aspects of myth-making. 
“Myth” (a word which had no fixed value among the 
Greeks, fables of invention, like the Choice of Hercules, 
and divine traditions of prehistoric origin being lumped 
together under the vague term muthos ) would seem to be 
now tacitly used by those who profess any accuracy of 
language to mean creations of imagination unconsciously 
working upon external nature ; and philological scholars 
in England and Germany have sometimes displayed 
a tendency to narrow the term still farther, and make 
myths little more than a disease of language. But the 
makers of myth are really the narrow limits within which 
man’s primitive action and thought are bound up; just 


THE CLAN AND NATURE. 


167 


as the destroyers of myth are man’s widening or deepening 
experiences of space or time, of social and individual life. 
The myth, which may consist in a rude effort to explain 
some element of physical nature or some form of animal 
life,* or some social custom or some rude sense of person- 
ality, does not become visible as myth until wider circles 
of comparison and contrast have superannuated the beliefs 
and corrected the experiences upon which it once reposed. 
The social aspect of clan myth-making may thus be easily 
conceived. Such myth-making constantly accompanies 
the fusion of clan groups, traditions of eponymous 
ancestry being interwoven as larger groups — clan-federa- 
tions or nations — are developed. It is indeed mainly this 
social fusion that makes the beginning of every national 
history fade into masses of myth, blending their social 
and physical origins in darkness which science has hitherto 
done little to lighten. 

The clan age, then, is the great maker of social as 
well as physical myths ; and, to return to the latter, it 
views physical Nature neither as a person in our 
modern sense of the word, nor as an impersonal entity ; 
neither as invested with individuality as we conceive it, 
nor yet as divested of personality and conceived in the 
abstract. Ages later than those of the clan reach the 
individual view of Nature ; and ages later still reach 
the abstract view of Nature. 

But here our brief review of nature’s aspects as modified 
by clan life must cease. The illustrations we had intended 
to offer must be reserved for another opportunity ; and 
we shall willingly leave the corroboration or denial of 
our views to students who can spare the time and trouble 
to criticise them in the light of early poetry. 

# Cf. the “ Beast-epic,” as studied by Jacob Grimm or Dr. Blcek ; or 
Zoological Mythology , by Professor Gubcrnatis. 


168 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


There are many other aspects of clan literature to 
which we should have gladly given even passing atten- 
tion. We might have discussed, for example, the treat- 
ment of animals in early poetry, such as that of the 
camel, in the Mo’allaqah of Lebid, taking refuge “in 
the hollow trunk of a tree with lofty branches standing 
apart on the skirts of the sandhills,” while overhead is 
a starless night of rain ; or that of the wild asses, in the 
same poem, raising as they gallop along “ a train of 
dust with shadows flitting like the smoke of a blazing 
tire.” But these and many other aspects of early poetry 
we must leave untouched. We have merely thrown out 
a few hints which have cost no little study, however small 
their value ; and we shall be content if the path of our 
inquiries is honestly pursued, and not at all offended if 
real study discovers a good deal to be corrected even 
in this little glimpse of a vast subject. 


BOOK III. 

THE CITY COxVIMON WEALTH. 














































































































































* 








. 











































CHAPTER I. 


THE CITY COMMONWEALTH GROUP. 

§ 45. It has been said with truth that the “ brief blossom- 
time ” of the Periclean age has so far dazzled modem 
critics that they have come to identify the short-lived 
spirit of that age with the spirit of the Greek race in 
general. The error cannot, however, with fairness be laid 
at the door of the modern critic alone. The Athenian 
spirit in its full life and vigour could not brook the 
thought of a time when it was not, threw a kind of 
glamour over the past history of Hellas, and universalised 
its own ideas at the expense alike of contemporary states 
of Greek society less developed than its own, and of the 
early life of chief and clan. Thus, to select a literary 
example, the dramatic spectacles and forensic pleading 
of Athens underlie the general canons of Aristotle’s poetic 
and rhetorical criticism, and supply the living particulars 
which his philosophy expands into ideal forms. Athens 
herself is, in fact, the type of a city commonwealth, her 
literature the ideal of such a city’s literature. The 
custom of speaking of “Greek” literature or the Greek 
“ nation ” — the latter an abuse of language to be pecu- 
liarly condemned — obscures the real nature of that social 
and political development which has given us the master- 
pieces of Athenian thought and art. Inheriting the 


172 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


poetic treasures of the tyrannies and the Homeric king- 
ships, songs of lyrists dependent on the tyrant’s palace 
or the chieftain’s hall, Athenian literature strikes its 
roots deep into the local life of prehistoric Hellas. The 
flowers and fruits of Athenian imagination and reason 
spring from a soil to which every part of Greece in its 
different degree of culture contributed somewhat; and 
under these external influences the mind of Athens may 
be observed progressing in the two directions so pro- 
foundly affecting literary growth — the evolution of 
individual character and the expansion of social life. 
Athens, gathering up into herself all the past and con- 
temporary Greek life of lower evolution, develops within 
herself an individualism deeper than the Greeks had 
ever known before, and a width of social sympathy 
impossible in days of early Greek isolation. In the 
synoikism of the Attic demes described by Thucydides * 
we have Athens springing out of isolated village commu- 
nities; in the days of Macedonian supremacy we have 
her old political hegemony exchanged for that intellectual 
centralism of Western civilisation which, from the time 
of Isokrates to the present, she has never lost. From 
the isolation and exclusiveness of clan life to world- 
empire of intellect — such is the brief epitome of Athenian 
progress ; and it is this twofold relation to a narrowly 
isolated past and a world-wide future that makes Athens 
the type of the city commonwealth in social and individual 
development. 

To illustrate this typical character we have only to 
contrast Athens with Home and the Italian republics. 
Rome, like Athens, finds the roots of her social life deep 
down in the clan age. That age, in fact, left upon Roman 
character marks far more lasting than can be observed in 
* Bk. ii. ch. 15 (vol. i. p. 203, Arnold’s edition, 1868). 


THE CITY COMMONWEALTH GROUP. 


173 


Athenian. From the time of the XII. Tables down to 
the utmost relaxation of the Patria Potestas the spirit 
of Eoman life was more or less that of the clan narrowed 
for the most part into the dimensions of the familia. 
But it is just this conservatism that prevents Borne from 
competing with Athens as the proper type of the city 
commonwealth in literary development. The reconcilia- 
tion of the clanned with the unclanned Komans is reached 
too late to allow a Boman literature, common property of 
plebeian and patrician, to spring up. The struggles of 
Plebs and Patres — essentially one of the clanless against 
the clansmen for equal rights of marriage, landed property, 
and political capacity — prevent the rise of Boman unity 
until the city commonwealth has become the metropolis 
of a municipal empire of force which must borrow its 
intellectual refinement from abroad. Not so with Athens. 
Here the commonwealth is neither parted asunder into 
gentiles and those who can boast no gens (plebs gentem 
non habet), nor widened, while thus internally divided, 
into the metropolis of a municipal empire. Nor like 
Florence, split into factions almost as permanently hostile 
as those of Borne, is Athens oppressed by membership of 
any world-empire ; the freedom of her thought knows 
not the restrictions of a world-religion, and that of her 
art is unoppressed by models whose imitation cannot but 
disappoint and whose existence often damps the ardour 
of young genius. The burning of the Alexandrian 
Library by the Khalif Omar, it has been said, may not 
have inflicted so severe a loss on civilisation as some 
have supposed, “ inasmuch as the inheritance of so vast a 
collection of writings from antiquity would, by engross- 
ing all the leisure and attention of the moderns, have 
diminished their zeal and their opportunities for original 
productions.” It would be interesting to estimate how 


174 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


far the genius of the Italian republics was diverted from 
literature to painting and sculpture by the presence of 
literary models which it must have seemed alike hopeless 
to surpass by creation and to equal by imitation. 

§ 46. Athens, then, is the type of the city common- 
wealth as an organism internally united, free to pursue 
its own development, unshackled by inheritances from 
the past, uncurbed by relations with any larger social 
union, political or religious. But it may be questioned 
whether the city commonwealth is a phase of social life 
found with sufficient frequency to admit of its being 
taken as a stage of social evolution. It may be said that 
Athens, Rome, Florence, not only represent, as we have 
admitted, very different types of the city commonwealth, 
but that these are isolated cases possessing no widely 
found characteristics which would justify us in setting 
them apart as specimens of a defined social organism. 

When we look at the East in general and the civilisa- 
tion of India in particular, we must candidly admit that 
there are large districts of the world’s surface in which city 
life has exerted no influence compared with the municipal 
systems of Greece and Rome and the nations which have 
risen among their ruins. If Rome passed at a single 
stride from a city commonwealth to a world-empire 
without waiting to grow into a nation, the social evolution 
of the East seems to have passed from the village 
community to world-empire without experiencing the 
stage of isolated city commonwealths. But the vast in- 
fluence of municipal life and thought on Western progress 
abundantly demonstrates the claim of the city common- 
wealth to be regarded as a leading stage in social 
development. Objectors, accordingly, will probably shift 
their ground to the difficulty of defining the nature of 
the city commonwealth. But a little examination will 


THE CITY COMMONWEALTH GROUP. 


175 


show that this difficulty is exaggerated, and that the 
objection founded upon it is one on which all attempts 
at definition in social science would suffer shipwreck. 
No doubt, if we were simply to put forward “ the city ” as 
a social classification, we should expose ourselves to the 
very serious objection that so vague a term confuses clan- 
cities like the Hebrew, in which the inhabitants are 
regarded as “ sons ” and “ daughters ” of the place — a 
curious combination of kinship and local contiguity as 
social ties — with municipal life, like that of Athens and 
Home, in which kinship of communal nature is gradually 
forgotten, and with royally or imperially chartered towns, 
like those of England, France, Spain, Germany, in which 
kinship ties are altogether lost and the connection 
between local and central government alone regarded. 
The term “ city commonwealth ” has been used to prevent 
any such ambiguity. It is intended to call attention to 
the fact that the “ city ” which occupies so conspicuous a 
place in social history is neither a village commune nor 
a chartered town, but a self-dependent unit, rising indeed 
out of clans and villages, and expanding, it may be, into 
an empire, but clearly distinguishable alike from com- 
munal and imperial systems. But the objection is really 
based on a mistaken view of social science which would 
destroy all its definitions. According to this view, our 
social classes must possess a clear-cut regularity of 
outline such as the insensible gradation of forms of social 
life renders impossible. We have previously referred to 
this irrational requirement, and can only repeat that the 
fallacy proceeds from the assumption that a class can 
ever possess the defined unity of individual being. 

So far as the social classification under discussion is 
concerned, it may be added that the range of the city 
commonwealth, like that of the clan itself, has been 


376 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 

concealed by the fact that rarely have physical and 
social conditions so combined as to allow the development 
of language and literature bearing distinct marks of a 
community so limited in extent. None the less clear is 
it that in passing from the localism of tribes and clans to 
the centralism of national life the city commonwealth is 
an intermediate stage which cannot be ignored, because 
some social groups have made it but a temporary halting- 
place, while others, from a variety of causes, have accepted 
it as their social ideal. 


CHAPTER II. 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 

§ 47. With what kind of literary stock did the Athenians 
start upon their career of literary production ? Without 
some such stock-taking we cannot know much about their 
real losses and gains, for losses as well as gains the spirit 
of this ideal city commonwealth certainly experienced. 

To such stock-taking the true literary artist — and he 
is the deepest sympathiser with Athenian feelings — is no 
doubt altogether opposed ; and to mark the difference 
between scientific and artistic handling of Athenian 
history we have purposely used an expression which 
suggests an inartistic but truthful treatment. “Art,” 
says Goethe, “is called art simply because it is not 
nature ; ” and wherever the artistic view of social and 
personal character prevails we may be prepared for a 
good deal of feigned history, a good many ideas claiming 
universal sway on account of their approaching the 
artist’s standard of the beautiful. Theognis made the 
Muses and the Graces chant as the burden of their song — 

“ That shall never be our care 
Which is neither good nor fair ; ” 

and it has been well said that the lines express the 
essence of that Greek feeling for the beautiful which in 
Athens reaches its culminating point. But such a feeling, 


178 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


whether expressed in words or music, in colours or in 
marble, in the sensuous ideas of a poet or in the naked 
generalities of a philosopher, contains a latent hostility to 
the spirit of historical truth. He who loves the beautiful 
with heart and soul is not likely to watch its develop- 
ment from rude beginnings with pleasure, or even to 
admit that its nature is so perishable as to have had a 
beginning at all. To pry into its secret growth were 
almost as painful to the true artist as to look upon its 
decay and death. 

It is a noble sentiment, worthy of greater and better 
beings than men, thus to reserve enthusiastic worship for 
that which looks immortal. But it is also a sentiment 
full of sad delusions, ever adorning with wreaths of 
eternal spring that which at a touch crumbles into dust, 
building everlasting ice-palaces which a few rays of even 
human reason melt away. In truth, the artist lives and 
must live, if he will act at all, a life of limitation fancied 
to be limitless. If he should know and feel his limits, 
if he should eat of the fatal tree of science and his eyes 
be opened, the ideas he expresses are likely to be revealed 
ephemeral in their essence, and his hands are apt to lose 
their cunning in a craft which has lost its divinity. For, 
however paradoxical it may appear, the true glimmerings 
of human divinity are visible, not in the creation of the 
artist, but in the reflection of the critic. The former is 
limited by the particular conditions of space and time, 
individual and social character, in and through which he 
works. The latter through a thousand of these shadows 
may catch an infinitely distant glimpse of the light 
which the artist imagines in the little day of the group 
for which he works. The artist deals with ra i rpbg $o£av, 
with appearances, simply because he is an artist, con- 
trolled by average language and thought, not a scientific 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 179 


discoverer delving at will for new ideas, and labelling 
them when found with strange word-marks. The critic 
also deals with ra 7 rpog So^av, but their range is for him 
far wider, and he possesses a certain scientific freedom of 
treatment in idea and language. The artist of Japan or 
China must work with the materials his social conditions 
offer ; the artist of Athens possessed a far finer quarry, but 
his materials were also socially limited ; the true critic, the 
“ discerner,” compares and contrasts the most divergent 
types of social and individual character at will, and, if 
the development he observes is fatal to any universal 
aesthetic standard and deprives him of the enthusiasm 
such a standard might supply, he is at least superior to 
the artist alike in the range and quality of his knowledge. 

The critic cannot, therefore, allow the art-conception 
of literature to stand for a moment between him and the 
object of his study, whether the champions of that con- 
ception are found among the Athenians themselves or 
their modern disciples.* And so, to return to our prosaic 
question, we ask again, With what kind of literary stock 
did the Athenians start upon their career of literary pro- 
duction ? 

* “ The students of antiquity,” says Mr. J. A. Symonds ( Greek Poets, 
Second Series, p. 303), “ attached less value than we do to literature of 
secondary importance. It was the object of their criticism, especially in 
the schools of Alexandria, to establish canons of perfection in style. . . . 
Marlowe, according to their laws of taste, would have been obscured by 
Shakspere ; while the multitude of lesser playwrights, whom we honour 
as explaining and relieving by their comradeship the grandeur of the 
dramatist (6 rpaycpdoiroios they might have styled Shakspere, as their 
Pindar was 6 \vpu<6s), would have sunk into oblivion, leaving him alone in 
splendid isolation. Much might be said for this way of dealing with 
literature, lly concentrating attention on undeniable excellence, a taste 
for noble things in art was fostered, while the danger that we run of 
substituting the historical for the aesthetic method was avoided.” Mr. 
Symonds, however, forgets that in their unhistorical criticism the Greeks 
committed the far more serious error of substituting the aesthetic method 
for the historical — an error which, decked in the beauty of Greek art, has 
done more to check the growth of historical science in modern Europe than 
can be easily estimated. 


180 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


§ 48. In the first place, the Athenians, as Ionians, 
possessed a dialect which, carried by their kinsmen to the 
Ionic cities of Asia Minor, became the earliest vehicle of 
prose in the literary history of Greece — the f E7r rdfxvxpQ 
of Pherecydes of Scyros was the first attempt at a prose 
treatise in Greek. In common with other Ionians, also, 
they possessed certain religious festivals — the Thargelia 
and Pyanepsia of Apollo, the Anthesteria and Lenaea of 
Dionysus, the Apaturia, Eleusinia, and others. The 
federations of early Ionians may indeed be compared 
with Arab and Hebrew tribe-leagues marking their 
federal union by sacred festivals ; and the eponymous 
ancestor of such leagues was long as highly respected in 
Athens as in Israel or Arabia. The Ion of Euripides, it 
has been remarked, was designed to extol the pure blood 
of Athenians, and to show that the Ionic stock from which 
they claimed descent was not, as represented in ordinary 
legends, that derived from the Hellenic stranger Xuthus, 
but had originated from Apollo himself ; and though the 
ordinary legends probably went much nearer the truth 
(just as Ezekiel in his denunciations of Israel reminds 
his countrymen of their hybrid origin, “ Thy father was 
an Amorite and thy mother a Hittite ”), the eponym Ion 
and the purpose for which the story is dramatised seem 
to mark the influence of clan ideas in Athens, even in an 
age when her old religion and clan morality were being 
rapidly undermined by individualised thought. But the 
Athenians had something more than the mere instrument 
of literature in common with their Ionic kinsfolk of the 
East ; from them they learned the A B C of philosophy, 
history, poetry. Among the Eastern Ionians chronicling 
had commenced at Miletus, the birthplace of the earliest 
philosophers of Greece — Thales, Anaximander, Anaxi- 
menes. An Ionic poet of the East, Callinus of Ephesus, 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 181 


lias left the earliest extant specimen of the elegy. Archi- 
lochus, the creator of iambic poetry, and the next iambic 
poet, Simonides of Amorgos, were both East-Ionian sati- 
rists. But though the political and literary growth of 
Athens came later than that of her wealthy kinsfolk, 
though East-Ionian soil and climate were greatly superior 
to those of Attica, the progress of literature was to 
depend, as it ever depends, upon social freedom no less 
than wealth; and, while Asiatic conquerors subdued the 
Ionians of Asia, and warlike races preferred to turn to the 
fertile plains of Argos, Thebes, and Thessaly, the shallow 
and rocky soil of Attica allowed a peaceful though manly 
development of social life to the Attic village communities. 

How far the old village life of Attica had given way to 
that of the city commonwealth, how far that marked oppo- 
sition of men of the country to men of the town which 
so powerfully affected later Athenian life had disclosed 
itself in Solon’s time, we shall not attempt to estimate. 
Suffice it to say that at this time the literature of Athens 
may be said to begin with the elegies and gnomic poetry 
of the great reformer himself. As a pioneer of Athenian 
literature, Solon seems to resemble an Oriental prophet 
rather than a literary artist. The strange delivery of the 
Elegy of Salamis, composed about 604 b.c., reminds us 
of the symbolical action with which the Hebrew nabi 
sometimes accompanied his impassioned speech.* Nor is 

* “ Suddenly appearing in the costume of a herald, with the proper 
cap ( mXiov ) on his head, and having previously spread a report that lie 
was mad, he sprang in the place of the popular assembly upon the stone 
where the heralds were wont to stand, and sang in an impassioned tone an 
elegy which began with these words : “ I myself come as a herald from 
the lovely island of Salamis, using song, the ornament of words, and not 
simple speech, to the people” (K. O. Muller, Lit. of An. Greece , cl), x. 
§ II). Muller might have added that the practice of poetic recitation 
was used by Xenophanes and Parmenides to disseminate their philosophic 
views. While writing is known to the very few (in East and West alike 
at first probably to the priests alone) and no reading public exists, the 
speech in verse or rhythmical prose, whether of Arab liawy, Hebrew Ad&i, 
or Athenian reformer, is an effective appeal to an unlettered audience. 


182 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


this the only respect in which Solon’s poetry typifies the 
infancy of Athenian literature. Another elegy (quoted 
by Demosthenes in his speech on the Embassy) describes 
the misery of the poor in terms which might have been 
applied to the debt-oppressed plebs of Eome, and seems 
to imply a conflict of clanned and clanless, men of pro- 
perty and the proletariate, which at one time augured 
as badly for Athenian as for Roman literature. But 
Athenian factions were to be fused into tolerable unity 
by internal tyranny and external war — two disciplining 
influences which also come out in Solon’s poetry, the 
former in an elegy which foretells the coming tyranny, 
the latter in the martial spirit of many of his verses, 
which have been contrasted in this respect with the 
effeminate tone of Mimnermus, one of his East-Ionian 
contemporaries. In Solon, then, we see Athenian litera- 
ture beginning in the rough but manly expression of a 
social spirit, a spirit in which collective interests leave as 
yet but little room for that personal and artistic poetry 
which the individualism of the East-Ionians had created. 

But in Solon’s age the Athenian people needed to 
be fused into social unity; and it was the work of the 
Peisistratids to effect this fusion against themselves. 
Mr. Mahaffy, in his Social Life in Greece, has called atten- 
tion to the work of the tyrants in diffusing artistic taste 
through Greece ; and in Athens their fondness of art 
was sufficiently proved by their building the temple of 
the Olympian Zeus. But their patronage of poetry and 
music more directly interests the student of Greek litera- 
ture. The character of the poetry thus patronised should 
not escape notice. It was not the drama in its rude 
beginnings, which, especially in comedy, required a 
popular inspiration ; it was the lyric of Anacreon, 
Simonides, Lasus, so much better suited to the atrno- 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 183 


sphere of a court. And, whatever truth is to be found 
in the Peisistratidean redaction of the Greek epics, it is 
equally significant that the Peisistratids “ were unques- 
tionably the first to introduce the recital of the entire 
Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenaea.” The heroic 
songs of the Homeric bards were more in keeping with 
the tyrant’s court than the dramatic spectacle. But the 
Athenian people had not yet expressed itself in any 
literary voice, and when that voice should make itself 
heard it was to be something very different from the 
personal lyric of the tyrants or the epic of the ancient 
kings. 

Thus, in reply to our question, with what kind of 
literary stock did the Athenians start on their career of 
literary production, we have found that, so far as literary 
form is concerned, the epic, lyric, and iambic forms of 
poetry were known to them chiefly through their East- 
Ionic kinsfolk, and that prose in a somewhat poetic 
dress may be reckoned among the formal elements which 
their literary capital owed to the same source. East- 
Ionic prose, prior to the destruction of Miletus at the 
beginning of the fifth century b.c., was being developed 
in narrative and philosophical forms which have been 
contrasted by Mure with the rhetorical prose of Athens 
in her literary age. The MaJcdmdt of A1 Hariri, how- 
ever, proves that rhetorical prose may be developed 
where Ekklesia and law-courts such as those of Athens 
are unknown. Still, in Miletus we have a municipal 
centre of Greek intellect widely differing from Athens 
in its social and physical conditions — a metropolis which, 
if undestroyed, would in all probability have produced a 
literature differing widely from that of Athens alike in 
form and spirit. 

But a more important question than that of poetical 


184 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


or prose forms now awaits us ; it is this : What stock of 
ideas did the Athenians at the beginnings of their literary 
production as a people possess ? It is here that sur- 
vivals from the clan age and the village community come 
thickly upou us. 

§ 49. In the first place, the Athenians inherited from 
the days of their village communities the idea of inherited 
guilt, which, strange to say, never seems to have received 
among them the angry repudiation we find in the Hebrew 
Ezekiel. Nay, what is still more remarkable, the idea 
comes upon us in Athenian literature with almost fresher 
vitality than in the Homeric poems. In the most striking 
Homeric reference to the Wehrgeld, a passage from the 
Iliad already quoted, the old communal liability has 
been cut down into the banishment of the individual 
criminal from his c, or village community, until the 
Wehrgeld is accepted by the kindred of the murdered 
man; unlike the system of the Arab Thar, no one can 
now sutler in the murderer’s stead, but he is personally 
exiled for a time to avoid any pollution attaching to his 
group. This personal liability in the Homeric age ought 
to be contrasted with the dramatic prominence of in- 
herited guilt at Athens probably three centuries later; 
for the contrast shows that, whatever social and intellec- 
tual progress had taken place in other parts of Greece 
and under different political or physical conditions, the 
clan spirit of the old Athenian demes retained sufficient 
strength even in the days of Sophocles to make itself 
felt in spectacles the pivot ethical conception of which 
is communal responsibility. While individualism else- 
where in Greece had been developed under the rule of 
kings or tyrants, the Athenian townsmen had retained 
enough of the primitive communal spirit to make it the 
life of their drama. Moreover, in this late survival of 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 185 

communal morality we may discover at least a partial 
explanation of one strange fact in Athenian literary de- 
velopment — the sudden burst and rapid decay of Attic 
genius. 

After the rule of the tyrants and the successful resist- 
ance to Persian invasion had given to Athens social unity 
and the hegemony of states greatly her superiors in civil- 
ised refinement, the communal morality of old Athenian 
life was suddenly exposed to an influx of new ideas 
unknown to the early poverty and isolation of Attica. 
Hence a conflict set in between old Athenian sentiments 
and the individualism which had long before been deve- 
loped in other parts of Greece, especially among the 
East-Ionians; and the material progress of Athens in 
wealth, which followed the Persian war and showed itself 
so notably during the administration of Pericles, allowed 
greater personal independence and far more leisure for 
debate than the early Athenians had possessed. It is in 
this conflict between things old and new that we find the 
chief source of Athenian genius; and if we are asked 
why that sunburst of creative power was so ephemeral, and 
why it was so soon obscured by clouds of verbal trifling 
and pedantic logomachy, we shall reply that the rapid 
destruction of old communal morality, when once the full 
force of Greek individualism had been let in on it, put 
an end to that duel of egoistic with altruistic thinking 
in which throughout the world’s history the brightest 
sparks of genius have been struck out, and by completely 
individualising Athenian intellect and imagination made 
one-sided the later culture of Attic genius. As Muller 
observes, the traditional maxims of Athenian morality were, 
at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, subjected to 
a scrutinising examination by a foreign race of teachers, 
chiefly from the colonies of the East and West ; and we 


186 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


can easily understand how the exposure of clan ethics to 
this widened circle of comparison and contrast was certain 
to awake Athenian consciousness to defects in their old 
beliefs. The Socratic questioning is an outcome of this 
conflicting consciousness ; the Platonic universalism is 
a dogmatic answer to the difficulties it raised ; and the 
customary offering thrown into the sea for the sins 
of the Athenian people does not more graphically bring 
before us the early Athenian morality of vicarious punish- 
ment than Socratic speculations on the relation of law to 
morality,* or the contrast of customary with subjective 
morality, t bring before us the days of subtle debaters, 
when the simple ethic of her clan age was as impossible 
for Athens as it would be for an adult to force himself 
back into the ideas of his infancy. It was not to be ex- 
pected that primitive doctrines of vicarious punishment 
and inherited sin could long retain their hold upon people 
accustomed to debate recondite problems of personal in- 
tention in their courts of law or legislative assembly. It 
was not to be expected that simple belief in the ancient 
morality could be retained while ties of kinship were 
steadily giving way to action from self-interest, and 
sophists were aiding the cleverness of Athenians bent 
on comparing the institutions and ideas of the various 
Greek states or analysing their own subjective thought. 
It made little difference whether the sophist w ? as a Pro- 
tagoras, ready to demonstrate the impossibility of truth 
from the conflict of Greek ideas alike claiming divinity, 
or a subtle Socrates prepared to raise moral problems 
which he could not, or at least did not, solve. In either 
case old ideas were being undermined ; and the struggles 
of men like Aristophanes to ridicule the new notions out 


* Xenophon Memorabilia , bk. i. ch. ii. § 42 , sqq. 
f lb. Cf. bk. i. ch. iii., and bk. ii. ch. ii. § 13 . 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 187 

of sight were but efforts, tragically comic, to restore life 
to the ancient morality by choking attempts to answer 
problems which had been forced upon Athenian atten- 
tion by altered social conditions and not merely suggested 
by hair-splitting sophists. 

§ 50. But besides conceptions of inherited guilt and 
vicarious punishment, positive signs of the early com- 
munal life, the clan age left on Athenian thought a 
negative mark which deserves to be noticed in connection 
with the decay of Athenian morals. This is the absence 
of any profound belief in a future state of personal reward 
or punishment. Considerable progress toward the con- 
ception of such a state had been made in the interval 
between the Odyssean age and that of Pindar. In the 
Nekuia, or eleventh book of the Odyssey, the gathering- 
place of the clans * is as yet by no means divided into 
abodes of happiness and suffering. We are indeed intro- 
duced to the sight of suffering in Hades ; but the persons 
singled out for punishment are not men, but demi-gods. 
Ulysses sees Tituos, son of far-famed Earth, outstretched 
many a rood, while two vultures on each side tear his 
liver for the wrong he had done to Latona. He sees 
Tantalus, expressly called a Saijutov , f thirsting while the 
water touches his chin, and putting forth his hands to 
touch the fruits which a wind “ scatters to the shadowing 
clouds.” Sisyphus, too, he sees, rolling with both hands 
the enormous stone that always falls back to the plain. 
But mere human personality is not yet distinguished in 
Hades by punishment or reward. The dead are but 

* Cf. 

irep\ S’ &\\at ayrjycpaO’, oaaoi ap avT<p 
O’lKcp eV AlyicrQoio Oavov Kal irorpoi' inecnrov. 

( Od ., xi. 388.) 

In Ezekiel’s famous picture of the fallen nations (ch. xxxii.) Hades admits 
not only elan but national distinctions, 
t Od , xi. 587. 


188 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


empty images of mortal men ; * to be king of their 
myriad clans is worse than to be a serf on earth ; and if 
Hercules is better off it is not because he is in Elysian 
fields, but because only his image (aSwAov) dwells in the 
cheerless Shadow-land, “ while he himself with the im- 
mortal gods enjoys the feast and lovely-ankled Youth.” 
The gathering-place of the clans, with its pale reflection 
of the life then known, has not yet been separated into 
the torture-place of the Evil and the paradise of the 
Good, though Minos, holding his golden sceptre, sits like 
any earth-king giving his inspired commands to the 
dead (OtfiKTTtvuv vzicvamv), “ while those around seek 
decisions (Swag) of the king.” 

So far the Greek conception of a future state was not 
greatly in advance of the Hebrew Sheol. But the break- 
up of clan ties and the progress of individualism were to 
bring out the need of such sanctions for personal morality 
as the future state can create. In truth, the Heaven and 
Hell conceptions were to develop in parallel lines with 
the development of social life. In the poems of Pindar 
the punishments and rewards of a future state are no 
longer confined to daemons and demi-gods ; plain human 
personality is to suffer for the evil it has wrought, or to 
enjoy a paradise of holiness which is neither the abode of 
the gods nor confined to translated heroes like Hercules. 
In a famous passage of Pindar’s second Olympian ode we 
have an evidence of this ethical progress worth quoting 
in full.t “ But if one possesses wealth aright he knows 
the future lot, that reckless souls of men who died on 
earth pay straightway their welirgelds (7mva'c),t for one 


* ttus ctXtjs > 'Ar8<$<r5e Kare\9f/j.ev, evOare veitpoi 
a<f>paBses valovcri , jSporwy etSwAa Kap.6vTuv ; 

( 15 ., 475 .) 

f fd $e puv ex wi/ TIS oldev t b fxeWov, k.t.\. 

j Cf. the Homeric use of -noivi]. The transference of the Wehrgeld to 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 189 


there is who by a hateful fate pronouncing sentences 
awards the penalties for deeds committed in the realm of 
Zeus ; but the good, enjoying sunlight ever equally by 
night and day, receive a life more free from griefs than 
ours, not harassing earth with strength of hand nor ocean 
wave for scanty sustenance. But all who joyed in 
keeping of their oaths, among the honoured of the gods 
rejoice in tearless life; the others bear affliction too 
dreadful to be looked upon. They who have thrice 
endured on either side the grave to keep their souls un- 
sullied by injustice, pursue the road of Zeus to Kronos’ 
tower ; there the ocean breezes blow round the islands of 
the blest, and the golden flowers are glowing, some on land 
from glistening trees, some the water nourishes ; there 
with chaplets made of these the blest twine their hands 
and heads by the just decrees of Rhadamanthus, whom 
Father Kronos, spouse of Rhea, throned above all gods, 
keeps as assessor ever ready by him.” Fragments of the 
Pindaric Threnoi contain similar ideas, for example one * 
which Professor Conington has translated thus — 

“But the souls of the profane, 

Far from heaven removed below, 

Flit on earth in murderous pain 
’Neath the unyielding yoke of woo ; 

While pious spirits tenanting the sky 
Chant praises to the mighty one on high.” 

But Athenian life was not destined to popularise such 
ideas. In the Frogs of Aristophanes we have, though of 
course in caricature, a picture of Hades little in advance 
of the Odyssean. Bacchus, with a lion’s skin thrown 
over his saffron-coloured robe and armed with a club, 
imitates Hercules, and, as Hercules had gone to fetch 

Hades recalls the presence of Blood-revenge in the spirit-world of tho 
Grendel. See passage from Beowulf translated above. 

* if/vxai 8’ affefiewv utt ovpdvioi 
yala ttwtwvtcu eV &Vye<Ti (poviois, 


190 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the dog Cerberus, descends to bring back Euripides from 
the infernal world. On his way, Bacchus inquires of 
Hercules “ what entertainers he had met when he went 
to fetch Cerberus, what harbours, bakers’ shops, lodging- 
houses, springs, roads, cities, hostesses ” — earthly associa- 
tions well kept up when Proserpine’s servant tells the 
pseudo-Hercules that “the goddess, when she heard of 
his arrival, began baking loaves, boiled some pots of soup 
of bruised peas, broiled a whole ox, and baked cheese- 
cakes and rolls.” But two innkeepers of Hades think 
they recognise in the pseudo- Hercules “the villain who 
came into our inn one day and devoured sixteen loaves, 
twenty pieces of boiled meat at half an obol apiece, and 
vast quantities of garlic and dried fish.” For these 
depredations the innkeepers determine to take ven- 
geance; and Bacchus, in fear of the coming evil, gets his 
slave Xanthias to assume the lion’s skin and club of 
Hercules. iEacus, attended by three myrmidons, now 
enters ; but the slave-hero holds his own, tells iEacus to 
go to the mischief, and as a proof of innocence offers 
Bacchus, now supposed to be his slave, to be tortured for 
evidence in true Athenian fashion. Xanthias and iEacus, 
farther on in the play, congratulate each other on the 
delight they take in prying into their masters’ secrets, 
and then “ blabbing them out of doors ; ” and iEacus 
tells his fellow-servant of the quarrel between iEschylus 
and Euripides, with whose famous contest the rest of the 
play is taken up. “ There is a law established here,” 
says JEacus, “ that out of the professions, as many as are 
important and ingenious, he who is the best of his own 
fellow-artists should receive a public maintenance in the 
Prytaneum and a seat next to Pluto’s.” iEschylus had 
held the “ tragic seat,” as being “ the best in his art;” but 
Euripides, when he came down, “ began to show off to foot- 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 191 


pads, and cutpurses, and parricides, and housebreakers 
— a sort of men there is a vast quantity of in Hades — and 
they, hearing his objections and twistings and turnings, 
went stark mad and thought him the cleverest. So Euri- 
pides was elated, and laid claim to the throne on which 
iEschylus was sitting.” 

It has been remarked that in this thoroughly Athenian 
Hades, with its Prytaneum and Athenian law giving 
public maintenance to such as excelled their fellow- 
artists, “ the under- world is an exact copy of the upper ; ” 
but the remark by no means exhausts the significance of 
the Frogs as an index to average Athenian notions of the 
future state. The treatment of the under-world as a mere 
reflection of Athenian life shows what little way the 
Athenians had made towards utilising the future state as 
the most solemn sanction for personal morality. Hercules, 
indeed, at the opening of the play, makes a passing 
allusion to those who “ have wronged their guests, beaten 
their parents, sworn false oaths, or transcribed a passage 
of the dramatist Morsimus,” as “ lying in the mud ” by 
way of punishment ; but the jocular allusion to Morsimus 
is not calculated to make us think of the Athenian con- 
ception of future retribution as at all a serious matter. 
We must regard such theories as those of Plato in his 
Phasdo as expressing the deep reflection of a very few 
who, like the philosopher, felt the need of sanctions for 
personal morality. But outside esoteric circles, such as 
the initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, there was little 
opportunity for earnest belief in the moral sanctions of a 
future state ; and one great obstacle to the popularity of 
such belief is to be found in Athenian slavery. The pro- 
minence of the slave in the Frogs , among all sorts and 
conditions of Athenian men and women in Hades, is a 
sharp reminder of this obstacle. How could the master 


192 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of slaves picture himself in Hades either with or without 
his slaves ? If they accompanied him into Hades, all the 
social distinctions of Athenian life would logically follow, 
and the exact reflection of Athens in Hades would be too 
grotesque even for the most pious and least sceptical of 
minds. If, on the other hand, there were no slaves in 
Hades, how could the freemen of Athens realise without 
inward ridicule a privilege which any of them might lose 
with his civil status ? But, over and above this hostility 
of slavery to a future state, Athenian ideas of future 
reward and retribution had to meet another cause of 
weakness. In the political life and poetical sentiments 
of Athens clan facts and feelings were long retained ; and 
as long as men believed in the inheritance of guilt in 
groups — as during the height of Athenian power and 
dramatic genius the Athenians undoubtedly did on the 
average believe — there was little moral need for the per- 
sonal rewards or punishments of the under-world. The 
very strength of this survival from the clan age concealed 
the want of sanctions for personal morality till it was too 
late for Athenian intelligence to do more than debate, as 
some among us are now debating, scientific bases for 
morality. 

§ 51. While survivals from the clan spirit supply the 
ethics of Athenian tragedy, while the conflict between 
such survivals and growing individualism produces the 
masterpieces of Athenian philosophy, the clan spirit in 
Rome brings about very different effects in Roman cha- 
racter and, through character, in Roman literature. 
Where Solon and Peisistratus had commenced the con- 
servative patricians of Rome were determined to remain, 
and for a long time did remain. Clan life, retained aud 
in some respects hardened in the Roman familia , left 
little scope for either literary or philosophic progress 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 193 

where childen sub potestate, women in perpetua tuteld, wives 
sub manu viri , showed how personal independence and 
character were still in communal leading-strings. While 
Roman life was socially ruled by the familia and politi- 
cally ruled by patrician gentes, there was little opportunity 
for any literature save that of sacred hymns and religious 
law-books such as the priestly castes of the East have 
so frequently produced; indeed, if the clanless element 
at Rome had not been sufficiently strong to modify this 
social and political system, there is little reason to think 
that Rome, physically or intellectually, would have risen 
above the level of these Eastern priest-oligarchies. But, 
though the conflict between plebeian and patrician could 
not strike out Athenian intelligence, it saved the “ urbs 
seterna” from such a fate; it struck out that vigorous 
political life of law-court and assembly in which Roman 
prose and jurisprudence were developed by a permanent 
progress remarkably unlike the sudden outburst and 
decay of Athenian genius. 

When the personal relations of Roman citizens under 
the despotic system of the familia are clearly realised 
Rome’s need of external aid in the development of her 
literature is manifest. Mommsen has said with truth 
that the culminating point of Roman development was 
reached without a literature ; and two causes are sufficient 
to explain this fact — the rigid family system which among 
full citizens proscribed individualised action and thought, 
and the deadly enmity between these full citizens and 
the clanless proletariate, so far as it prevented an enthu- 
siastic political union which might have made itself felt 
in popular song. If the conflict of plebeian with patrician 
was needed to break down gentilic exclusiveness, it at the 
same time retarded and perhaps altogether prevented the 
rise of a popular Roman literature. Not until the Persian 


194 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


war had fused Athenians into a political unity they might 
otherwise never have attained did the fruits of Attic 
genius show themselves ; and, had internal clan distinc- 
tions survived the age of Solon and Peisistratus in any- 
thing like their patrician vitality at Eome, Athenian 
verse and prose would probably never have attained any 
remarkable degree of beauty and symmetry. The reason 
for the absence of literature in early Rome has been sought 
in “ the original characteristics of the Latin race ; ” but, 
like the answer of Moliere’s famous doctor, or M. Renan’s 
explanation of Hebrew and Arab monotheism by “ Semitic 
instinct,” this explanation simply repeats the problem in 
another form. The true explanation must be found in 
causes affecting the general character of men and women 
at Rome ; and any student of Roman law and early social 
life need not be at a loss for such causes. The conscious 
contrasts of patrician, plebeian, alien, and servile status, 
and the strong conservatism of clan character, are the 
primary causes of that unimaginative life which made the 
Roman law-court the fountain-head of European juris- 
prudence, but compelled the mistress of force to look for 
literary guidance to the mistress of intellect. Without 
any store of common sympathies which plebeian and 
patrician might feel alike, Rome had no social ideals 
such as literature desires; and if she had heroes of her 
own, they only served to summon up recollections of 
kingly or aristocratic despotism. 

The production of Roman literature, about the middle 
of the third century B.c., opened with a stock of materials 
and ideas meagre in the extreme. No kinsmen of Rome 
had created a vehicle of verse like the hexameter, iambic, 
or elegiac of Greece ; the rude Saturnian seems to have 
been the only metre known. Nor had any Miletus of the 
West laid the foundations of Roman prose; chronicles, 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 195 


of the barest kind conceivable, and laws, apparently 
without note or comment, seem as yet to have been the 
only types of Latin prose. Dionysius,* indeed, speaks of 
izcLTpioL vfivoi as still sung in his own time by Homans ; 
and Cicero twice refers to a passage in Cato’s Origines 
which speaks of old Eoman songs sung at banquets to 
the accompaniment of a tibia in praise of great men. 
But, in spite of Niebuhr’s and Macaulay’s inferences 
from these authorities, it cannot be seriously maintained 
that Rome ever possessed a popular ballad-poetry. For, 
in the first place, Rome possessed no background of 
myth which such early poetry might have used as its 
wonderland. This absence of myth has been attributed 
to the nature of Rome’s early religion ; and it must be 
admitted that such transparent names as Saturnus 
(Sowing), Fides, Terminus, were not likely to aid the 
creation of poetic mythology. But deeper reasons for 
the absence of heroic mythology in early Rome are dis- 
coverable in her ancient social life. Whatever germs 
of epic poetry may have existed in the private hymns 
or songs of patricians, they had no opportunity to ripen 
into a genuine epic among the constant conflicts of clans- 
men, who had “ Fathers ” to celebrate, with the clanless 
plebs. The traditional stories of Roman gentes were 
too closely interwoven with political associations to be 
quietly gathered into the beautiful poetic forms of the 
Greek myths, which might never have reached their 
msthetic perfection had they been so closely bound with 
things of daily life. Niebuhr’s conception of a Roman 
ballad-poetry overlooks the fact that the true home of 
the ballad, out of which the epos may grow, is not the 
life of a city, nor that of clans seeking to keep up their 
exclusiveness in the presence of city life, but the halls 

* Cf. Macaulay, preface to Lays of Ancient Rome, pp. 13 and 15, notes. 


196 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of chiefs where individual character is surrounded by a 
divine halo which the democratic intercourse of the city 
cannot tolerate. 

§ 52. The semi-dramatic Fescennine Dialogues, the 
►Saturae, Mimes, and Fabulae Atellana} (the last, accord- 
ing to Livy, exclusively in the hands of freeborn citizens 
and not polluted by professional actors), show that even 
at the beginnings of Roman literature city life, in spite 
of gentile aristocracy, was roughly producing its charac- 
teristic literary product — the drama. But here, too, the 
patrician clan spirit opposed the progress of the Camence 
and left a clear way for the Muses of Greece. It would 
have been untrue to Roman social life to have exhibited 
as Roman the relations of father and son, husband and 
wife, as Plautus and Terence borrowing from Greek 
models exhibit them always on a thoroughly Greek 
stage. The scene of the Ampliitruo is at Thebes, of the 
Asinaria probably at Athens, of the Aulularia at Athens ; 
of the Bacchides, Casina, Epidicus, Mercator , Mostellaria, 
Persa , Pseudolus , Stichus , Trinumus , Truculentns, at 
Athens ; that of the Captivi in iEtolia, of the Cistellaria 
at Sicyon, of the Gurculio at Epidaurus, of the Mensechmi 
at Epidamnus, of the Miles Gloriosus at Ephesus, of the 
Pcenulus at Calydon, of the Rudens in Africa near Cyrenae ; 
so that not one of the twenty extant plays attributed to 
Plautus has its action in Italy, much less in Rome. The 
Greek places, names, characters, of the Plautine and 
Terentian dramas are to be accounted for not merely 
by the desire of avoiding offence and by their close 
imitation of Greek models, but also by the comparative 
absence of such characters and personal relations at 
Rome as would suit the dramatist. Neither the Roman 
son, whose peculium reminds us rather of a slaves status 
than that of a free man, nor the Roman father, with the 


CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 197 

solemn despotism of patria potestas, nor above all the 
Roman matron, wife, or daughter, in their perpetual 
tutelage, possessed that kind of freedom which was 
required by the drama of individualised life. The Roman 
drama, tragedy and comedy alike, had to wear Athenian 
livery in order to get out of associations which met 
dramatic freedom at every turn with the cold status of 
patrician life. 

Thus the clan spirit in Athens and Rome affected the 
beginnings of Athenian and Roman literatures very 
differently. Not strong enough in Athens to keep the 
city divided into hostile camps, yet strong enough to 
remain the inner life of traditional morality, it sets 
Athenian genius on fire by its conflict with individualised 
ideas pouring in from all parts of Greece, and required 
by the rapidly altering conditions of Athenian social life. 
Too strong in Rome to allow even physical, much less 
intellectual, freedom, it stops the progress of Roman 
unity and literature alike, and forces the founders of the 
Roman drama to seek in Greece the social and personal 
characteristics their art requires. 


198 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CHAPTER III. 

POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 

§ 53. The peculiar poetic production of the city is the 
dramatic spectacle, whether in the rude shape of such 
plays as those of Hans Sachs or in the exquisite symmetry 
of Sophocles’ Antigone. We do not, of course, mean to 
maintain either that all cities, if left to their own literary 
evolution, will of necessity produce a drama, or that no 
social conditions save those of city life have produced 
this form of literature. The Indian, Chinese, and Ja- 
panese dramas show the weakness of any such general 
assertions; and wherever an audience can be gathered 
together, to a passion-play like the Persian or a court- 
play like the Japanese, we may be sure that religion 
or royalty will supply the place of the city audience to 
a certain extent. But the religious or courtly spectacle 
cannot be regarded as a perfect substitute for the city 
drama. It is in the organisation of city life that the 
greatest variety of human character within the smallest 
space is produced; and this variety of human types 
allows dramatic analysis of character its fullest scope. 
Accordingly, the most admirable specimens of dramatic 
art have been the work of cities, from the Athens of 
Pericles to the London of Elizabeth and the Paris of 
Louis Quatorze. We are, however, at present concerned, 
not with the drama of national capitals, but only with 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 199 


that of the city as a self-developed community — the city 
commonwealth. In the drama of the city commonwealth 
we may not meet certain interesting features of the 
Chinese and Indian theatres — the prominence of physical 
nature, for example. In the same drama we may not 
find such a variety of character as in that of a national 
capital like Elizabethan London. But in the narrow 
range of the city commonwealth we shall perhaps be 
able to trace the effects of social evolution on the form 
and spirit of the dramatic spectacle with greater clearness 
than in the complicated life of modern nations, or the 
comparatively motionless society of India and China. 

Still it must not be supposed that the dramas of the 
East are altogether unlike that of Athens. The singing- 
character of the Chinese theatre, for example, reminds 
us in some respects of the Athenian chorus, only that 
(like Shakspere’s use of the chorus) an individual actor 
here takes the place of the Athenian group. Indeed, 
the lyrical drama of Japan presents so many likenesses 
to the Athenian that we shall here quote Mr. Basil Hall 
Chamberlain’s description of the origin and form of this 
Eastern theatre. 

“ Towards the end of the fourteenth century,” says Mr. 
Chamberlain,* “ in the hands of the Buddhist priesthood, 
who during that troublous period had become almost 
the sole repositories of taste and learning, arose the 
lyric drama, at first but an adaptation of the old religious 
dances, the choric songs accompanying which were ex- 
panded and improved. The next step was the intro- 
duction of individual personages which led to the adoption 
of a dramatic unity in the plot, though the supreme 
importance still assigned to the chorus left to the 
performance its mainly lyric character till, at a some- 

* Japanese Classical Poetry , p. 13. 


200 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


what later period, the theatrical tendency became supreme 
and the romantic melodrama of the modern Japanese 
stage was evolved.” Farther on Mr. Chamberlain 
describes the manner of representing this lyric drama. 
“The stage, which has remained unaltered in every 
respect from the beginning of the fifteenth century, 
when the early dramatists Seama and Otourmi acted 
at Kiyauto before the then Shiyaugun (Shogun or 
Tycoon, as Europeans usually pronounce it) Yoshimasa, 
is a square wooden room, open upon all sides but one 
and supported on pillars, the side of the square being 
about eighteen English feet. It is surrounded by a 
quaint roof somewhat resembling those to be seen on 
the Japanese Buddhist temples, and is connected with 
the green-room by a gallery some nine feet wide. Upon 
this gallery part of the action occasionally takes place. 
Added on to the back of the square stage is a narrow 
space where sits the orchestra, consisting of one flute- 
player, two performers on instruments which in the 
absence of a more fitting name may be called tambourines, 
and one beater of the drum, while the chorus, whose 
number is not fixed, squat on the ground to the right 
of the spectator. In a line with the chorus, between 
it and the audience, sits the less important of the two 
actors during the greater portion of the piece. (Two 
was the number of the actors during the golden days 
of the art.) The back of the stage, the only side not 
open to the air, is painted with a pine tree, in accordance 
with ancient usage, while, equally in conformity with 
established rules, three small pine trees are planted in 
the court which divides the gallery from the space 
occupied by the less distinguished portion of the 
audience. The covered place for the audience, who all 
sit on the mats according to the immemorial custom 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 201 


of their countrymen, runs round three sides of the stage, 
the most honourable seats being those which directly 
face it. Masks are worn by such of the actors as take 
the parts of females or of supernatural beings; and the 
dresses are gorgeous in the extreme.” Mr. Chamberlain 
then notices “the statuesque immobility of the actors 
and the peculiar intonation of the recitative. When 
once the ear has become used to its loudness it is by no 
means unpleasing, while the measured cadences of the 
chorus are from the very first both soothing and im- 
pressive. The music unfortunately cannot claim like 
praise, and the dancing executed by the chief character 
towards the close of each piece is tedious and meaningless 
to the European spectator. The performance occupies 
a whole day. For, although each piece takes on an 
average but one hour to represent, five or six are given 
in succession, and the intervals between them are filled 
up by the acting of comic scenes. Down to the time 
of the late revolution much ceremony and punctilious 
etiquette hedged in on every side those who were 
admitted to the honour of viewing this dramatic 
performance at the Shiyaugun’s court. Now the doors 
are open to all alike, but it is still chiefly the old 
aristocracy who make up the audience; and even they, 
highly trained as they are in the ancient literature, 
usually bring with them a book of the play to enable 
them to follow with the eye the difficult text, which 
is rendered still harder of comprehension by the varying 
tones of the choric chant.” 

In this description of the formal elements of the 
Japanese drama we cannot but be struck by several 
resemblances to the Athenian stage. The prominence 
of the chorus, of dance and song and music, the gradual 
introduction of individual actors distinct from the chorus, 


202 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the gradual subordination of the chorus to the actors 
in the development of the drama, the small number 
of the actors, the use of masks and splendid dresses, 
the ‘‘statuesque immobility of the actors,” the “ intonation 
of the recitative,” the representation of several plays in 
succession, have all their parallels in the famous drama 
of Athens. The chorus, as is well known, with its 
combination of dance, and song, and melody, and mimetic 
action, makes the central figure of the Athenian drama, 
the figure round which the rude beginnings of that drama 
take their rise and whose disapperance heralds its decay. 
Some of the leading differences between the dramas 
of modern Europe and that of Athens may be attributed 
to the choral and lyric source of the latter contrasted 
with the early predominance of dialogue in the former; 
and it is to be remembered that this Athenian chorus 
carries us back to those choral songs in which we have 
previously found the beginnings of literature. When 
we trace the rise of the Attic drama from sacred mysteries 
in which priests and priestesses acted the story of 
Demeter and Cora, or from the betrothal of the second 
arch on’s wife to Dionysus at the Anthesteria, or from 
such festival rites as that in which a maiden " representing 
one of the nymphs in the train of Dionysus ” is pursued 
by a priest “ bearing a hatchet and personating a being 
hostile to the god,” * we must not forget that the choral 
song carries us back from the adult city community 
of Athens to the village festivals of early Attica. If 
the ethical ideas of the Athenian drama take their rise, 
as we have already seen, from the village community 
and clan, so also does the choral form. The chorus 
in the rapid progress of Athenian life and art is far more 
interesting than in the comparatively stationary civilisa- 
* K. O. MUller, Hist. Git. Lit. (Donaldson’s translation, vol. i. p. 381). 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 203 


tion of Japan; at Athens its rise and decay curiously 
illustrate early communal life and the evolution of 
individual action and thought; and the social develop- 
ment of the city commonwealth is thus reflected in the 
form as well as in the spirit of its drama. 

§ 54. In Athens a group of persons — for such, of 
course, is the nature of the chorus — is the earliest centre 
of dramatic interest. The songs and dances of this group 
make the body of the dramatic spectacle ; and though 
its leaders may now and then come forward separately 
(like the leaders of a Russian KJiorovod), or its members 
may answer each other assembled round the altar of 
Dionysus, such responses and glimpses of individual 
action do not yet bring us to any regular dialogue, much 
less to any display of personal character. The chorus is 
the literary link between the sacred festivals of early 
Attic village communities and the semi-religious theatre 
of Athenian tragedy ; but the aesthetic pleasures of 
character-drawing are only developed out of this group 
of worshippers by that profound change in the social 
character of Athenian men and women which allowed the 
tragic stage to become the vehicle of Euripidean casuistry, 
and converted the idealism of the old comedy into the 
everyday personages of Menander. Let us follow some 
of the formal and spiritual changes through which the 
Athenian drama passed in the course of this indi- 
vidualising process. 

One of the first steps towards a drama of personal 
character seems to have been taken about 536 B.C., when 
Thespis is said to have added to the choral group one 
actor (he was called the vtt oKptri)g, or “ answerer,” because 
he “ answered ” the songs of the chorus) whose dialogue 
with the chorus offered some scope for the display of 
individuality. This new departure of the old Athenian 
10 


204 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


spectacles was carried still farther byPhrynichus (b.c. 512), 
who made this actor play female parts for the first time. 
Meanwhile the chorus itself was becoming more flexible ; 
the old chorus of Satyrs, the appropriate accompaniment 
of the Bacchic festival, was being displaced by choruses 
suited to the particular subject of the play, and in the 
time of Chcerilus (524 b.c.) the Satyric drama seems to 
have been separated from regular tragedy. Thus, on the 
one hand, the old group of worshippers are being gradually 
transformed into a group personage with a general charac- 
ter conformable to the particular play, while, on the other 
hand, the individual actor is introducing dramatic per- 
sonality distinct from groups or abstract personages. 
The Bacchic festal costume of the actors, their “stiff 
angular movements, 1 ” their tragic masks, the monotonous 
kind of chant in which the dialogue is rather sung than 
spoken,* may remind us still of theatres so slightly 
developed as the Japanese, but the progress of dialogue 
and character is rapidly carrying us towards a dramatic 
region into which Japanese, Chinese, and even Indian 
dramatists, compared with the Athenian masters, have 
hardly ever penetrated. For the Athenian dramatists, 
becoming secular artists instead of religious teachers, 
are learning to depict personality with all its shades of 
thought and sentiment even through the hackneyed 
heroic personages of their sacred spectacle, and the 
vigorous growth of Athenian life is beginning to supply 
them, perhaps unconsciously, with new types of human 
nature. 

But though the ?}0o7rot'/'a, or character-drawing of 
individuals , marks the master-hand of the Athenian 

* K. 0. Muller quotes from Lucian the phrase irepiatieiv ra lanfiela, “to 
sing round the iambics,” which certainly gives us a very graphic idea of 
the tragic “ mouthing ” referred to by Demosthenes in his savage attack on 
iEschines. 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 205 


dramatist, both the formal and spiritual elements of the 
Athenian stage long retained survivals from the choral 
group of earlier days. The whole structure of the 
Athenian theatre, as Muller says, “ may be traced to the 
chorus whose station was the original centre of the whole 
perforraance.’ , The orchestra grew out of the \6pog, or 
“dancing place” of Homeric times, to which we have 
previously alluded in connection with the choral song- 
dances of the clan. In the centre of the orchestra the 
altar of Dionysus, round which the dithyrambic chorus 
used to dance in a circle, gave way to a sort of raised 
platform, the thymele , as it was called, which, besides 
serving as a resting-place for the chorus, significantly 
marked the religious origin of the Athenian drama. 
The openness of the theatre to the sky and the remark- 
ably long but shallow stage — two formal features of the 
Athenian theatre not to be overlooked — may likewise 
be attributed to the presence of the chorus. Again, 
whatever the mixed origin of the “ unities ” as expressed 
by French critics may have been, there can be little 
doubt that a certain fixity of time and place was in a 
manner necessitated by the chorus, which could not be 
easily shifted either in space or time. Finally, the 
Athenian conception of dramatic authorship, which 
subordinated the word-composition to the public pro- 
duction of the play, was partially due to the trouble and 
expense of teaching the choral songs and dances. 

§ 55. But the formal prominence of the chorus in 
the early Athenian drama is scarcely more marked than 
the spiritual. It is here, indeed, that we find the clearest 
links between the chorus and the social conditions of 
early Attica. The dramatisation of human action in 
groups or abstract personages closely reflects the promi- 
nence of group life and unindividualised thought in 


206 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


early societies; hence it was only when individualised 
conduct and sentiment became the groundwork of aver- 
age Athenian character that the subtleties of Euripides 
showed their hostility not only to the old prominence of 
the chorus, but also to those mythical personages of the 
sacred spectacle who were too abstract to suit an age 
of small personalities. Three striking features of the 
AEschylean drama are therefore to be explained by 
the early social life of Athens — the predominance of the 
chorus in the plays of AEschylus, his leaning to abstract 
or impersonal dramatis personas, and his ethical machinery 
of inherited guilt. The chorus is the central point in 
the spiritual as well as in the formal elements of the 
old Attic drama; but the reason for this is not to be 
found in the chorus itself as the production of conscious 
dramatic art — for the rude drama of early Attica had 
as little to do with art as an Indian Buffalo-dance — but 
in the deme life of early Attica, in the small social groups 
which here, as everywhere else in the world, once 
subordinated all personal action and thought to their 
own collective being. It was one great work of city life 
at Athens to cut down this collective being into individual 
units, each with his separate personal character and 
destiny, and the progress of this work is reflected very 
closely in the progress of the Attic drama. 

In the seven extant plays of AEschylus there are 
only about seventeen individual personages, the rest of 
the forty-five dramatis personae being either groups, as 
the chorus itself, or general and abstract personages such 
as the herald and the messenger, Might and Force. In 
the Suppliants personal character has hardly any place 
at all; for neither Danaus nor the king of the Argives 
(who with the chorus and a herald make up all the 
dramatis personae ) can be called a study of character. In 


POETRY OP THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 207 


Prometheus allegorical and divine personages interest 
themselves in that vast struggle between Man and Fate 
before which all the necessary littleness of personal 
humanity disappears. In the Persae we can hardly 
count the ghost of Dareius as a personal character— it 
rather typifies the sunken sun of Persian conquest ; and 
if Atossa and Xerxes are real human personages, they 
are also general types of Persian ostentation and pride ; 
for the play, like some Chinese plays, rather points the 
moral of a great historical event than attempts to describe 
human character in individuals, and, as even Muller is 
forced to admit, “ looks at first glance more like a lament 
over the misfortunes of the Persians than a tragic drama.” 
Again, in the Seven against Thebes , Eteocles, Ismene, 
Antigone are no doubt human personages, but the “ pivot 
upon which the whole piece turns ” — Polynices* resolu- 
tion to meet his brother in combat while recognising the 
fatal act as the effect of his father’s curse — carries us 
back to the early life and morals of Attica as plainly as 
any abstract personage or the choral group itself. But 
it is needless to run through all the extant plays of 
iEschylus in our search for impersonal or, as modern 
critics would say, “ undramatic ” elements. No doubt 
even within his extant plays there are signs of a growing 
subordination of the chorus — that of the Choephoroe , as 
Mr. Mahaffy observes,* is not only the confidant but the 
accomplice of the actors. But the fact that the chorus is 
the central character (if we may so apply a term long 
restricted to personal action by modern criticism) in the 
Suppliants, Persae, and Eumenides would be alone sufficient 
to prove the prominence of the group on the stage of 
iEschylus. 

In the drama of Sophocles the chorus is being sup- 
* Hist. Class. GJc. Lit., vol. i. p. 269. 


208 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


planted by individual characterisation. Only one of 
Sophocles’ extant plays derives its name from the chorus 
— the Traehinise ; and here, in marked contrast with the 
Suppliants of iEsckylus, the figures of Hercules and 
Deianira keep the chorus completely in the background. 
The dialogue, the true medium of character-drawing, 
was now being developed by the increased number of 
actors. If a third actor had been introduced in the 
Agamemnon , Choephoroe, and Eumenides of -ZEschylus (his 
other extant tragedies are constructed for two actors), all 
the plays of Sophocles are adapted for three actors, 
excepting the (Edipus at Colonus , which could not be 
acted without the introduction of a fourth ; and, with 
this increase of actors, dialogue was narrowing the domain 
of choral song. This reduction of the choral element 
in the Athenian drama is easily seen by comparing the 
proportion of the entire play assigned to the chorus in 
the tragedies of Sophocles with the proportion so assigned 
by iEschylus. In Sophocles’ (Edipus Bex a little more 
than one fourth of the play is assigned to the chorus ; in 
his Antigone a little less than one fourth ; in his Ajax a 
little more than one fifth ; in his (Edipus at Colonus a 
little less than one fifth ; in his Traehinise one sixth ; and 
in his Eleetra and Philoctetes about one seventh. Thus, 
using the extant plays of Sophocles as the basis of calcula- 
tion and allowing for some uncertainty in the choral lines, 
we may say that on the average he assigned about one fifth 
of his play to the chorus. Hut, on examining the extant 
plays of jEschylus, we find that more than one half of the 
Suppliants is assigned to the chorus ; that somewhat less 
than one half is so assigned in the Agamemnon, Seven 
against Thebes, Bersse, Choephoroe, and Eumenides; and that 
in the Prometheus* alone does the proportion sink so low 

* The proportion of this play assigned to the chorus is plainly an 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 209 


as that of one-fifth. Hence it appears that the chorus 
occupies about twice as large a space in the iEschylean 
as in the Sophoclean drama; and an increased promi- 
nence of individual character in the latter is profoundly 
in accordance with this change. Sophocles’ Antigone, 
Electra, Ajax, Philoctetes, (Edipus, stand out more in- 
dependently from the choral group than any HSschylean 
personage, and transfer dramatic interest from the choral 
ode to the individual dialogue. It is true that in the 
plays of Sophocles associations of early clan life still live 
side by side with the growing dominion of individualism ; 
in the Antigone , for example, the conflict between family 
rites (such as the familia of Kome would have sternly 
maintained) and the commands of the State — a conflict 
sure to set in as clan custom gave way to State law — is 
the mainspring of the dramatic action ; and inherited 
guilt is almost as powerfully depicted in the CEdipus Bex 
as in the iEschylean trilogy. But in the extant plays 
of Sophocles we have nothing resembling the abstract 
personages of the Prometheus Bound , nothing resembling 
the allegorical spirit of that famous -tragedy ; on the 
Sophoclean contrasted with the iEschylean stage character 
is being reduced from the dimensions of group life and 
colossal personifications to individuality like that of men 
and women, but still ideally great. 

In the drama of Euripides this double process of 
individualising character and subordinating the chorus 
to the dialogue reaches its farthest tragic development, 
and most clearly reflects the altered conditions of social 
life at Athens. Aristophanes, in his Frogs f notes this 

imperfect index to the impersonal action it contains. To judge this im- 
personal element fairly we snould not only add to the chorus the lines 
attributed to K paros, but should decide how far Io, Okeanus, and even 
Prometheus himself aro personages at all; for in this highly abstract play 
personality, as might be expected, is deficient. 


210 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


prominence of dialogue at the expense of the choral 
songs. “ Let some one bring me a lyre,” says iEschylus 
in his contest with Euripides; “ and yet what occasion 
for a lyre against him ? Where is she that rattles with 
the castanets ? Come hither, Muse of Euripides, to 
whose accompaniment these songs are adapted for sing- 
ing.” Not mediating between opposing parties (save to 
some extent in the Medea), as the chorus of Sophocles had 
fulfilled its dramatic function, much less dominating the 
entire drama as in iEschylus, the chorus of Euripides is 
often an inferior actor, the confidant of the protagonist, 
while its odes are frequently “ arbitrarily inserted ( embo - 
lima) as a lyrical and musical interlude between the acts 
without any reference to the subject of the play, much in 
the same way as these pauses are nowadays filled up 
with instrumental music ad libitum .” Of the nineteen 
extant tragedies of Euripides, five indeed derive their 
names from the chorus — the HeraMeidas, Suppliants , 
Trojan Women , Bacchte , and Plxoenissse ; but we need only 
compare the proportion of each of these dramas assigned 
to the chorus with the proportion so assigned in the Sup- 
pliants of iEschylus to realise the complete subordination 
into which the central figure of the old drama has fallen. 
In the Suppliants of iEschylus, as we have already observed, 
considerably more than one-half of the entire play is 
assigned to the chorus ; in the Eeraldeidae of Euripides 
less than one-fifth of the play is so assigned ; in his Sup- 
pliants and Trojan Women about one-fifth is so assigned ; 
in his Bacchse about one-fourth belongs to the chorus, and 
in his Plxoenissse little more than one-sixth. 

This subordination of the chorus to the dialogue in 
Euripides is accompanied by the withdrawal of the ethical 
pivot of the old drama. None of the extant plays of 
Euripides makes the clan ethic its real centre of interest. 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 211 


The religious horrors of inherited guilt are supplanted 
by subtle analyses of personal character, and the rhetoric 
of the contemporary law-court and assembly are now 
much more effective than the moral preaching of early 
tragedy. On the stage of Euripides everything of real 
interest is individual, nothing impersonal ; the chorus 
has here survived into conditions of action and thought 
in which it is out of place, and the stereotyped practice 
of taking the dramatis personas from the old mythical 
heroes of Hellas is now a lumbering impediment to a 
tragedian who had little in common with old Greek 
morality or heroism. The chorus of iEschylus, says 
Euripides, in the Frogs , “ used to hurl four series of songs 
one after another without ceasing, while the few characters 
he used were silent.” The “ son of the market-place,” 
the “ gossip-gleaner,” prays to his “ own peculiar gods ” — 
“ O Air and thou well-hung tongue and sagacity and 
sharp-smelling nostrils, may I rightly refute whatever 
arguments I assail ! ” — but ^Eschylus claims to have 
fulfilled the true poetic function (“to make the people 
in the cities better ”) by composing a drama “ full of 
martial spirit” (the Seven against Thebes ) — “every man 
that saw it would long to be a warrior ” — while Euripides 
had been teaching men “ to practise loquacity and wordi- 
ness.” Such had been the progress of the Athenian 
drama — from the moral and religious spectacle, with 
its central group of worshippers, to an aesthetic exhi- 
bition of personal character ; and now the conservative 
comedian was revolting from the new drama of art to 
the old drama of moral teaching — an Athenian victory 
for the Chinese ideal of the theatre. 

§ 56. But, in truth, Aristophanes’ dramas reflect the 
individualism of contemporary Athens, the characteristics 
of the men and women who subjected the old traditional 


212 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


morality of Athens to the dissolvent of all creeds — 
individual reason — almost as clearly as any dramas of 
Euripides. The conservative comedian saw farther than 
the tragic sophist, but his penetrating sight was sharpened 
by the same conscious contrast of things old and new 
in which Euripides found the pleasures of purely negative 
thought. The secret of Aristophanes — by far the most 
astonishing figure in the whole crowd of Athenian poets 
and philosophers and orators, a man whose poetry, 
exquisite in spite of being perpetually draggled through 
the mire, is full of profound reflection in spite of its 
uproarious wit — the secret of this solemn jester, this 
conservative revolutionist, this religious atheist, this 
communistic defender of Attic aristocracy, is also the 
secret of Euripides. The time-spirit of individualism is 
in each ; but the one accepts it as a blessing because he 
sees only the freedom of negative thinking, the other 
scorns and derides and hates it because his eagle glance 
foresees the destruction of old Athenian sympathies it 
must effect. But Aristophanes just as little as Euripides 
can live out of or above the new conditions of Athenian 
thought and action ; he is a citizen not of his own 
Cuckoo-town, but of Athens with all its limitations of 
space and time. 

It is, in fact, through the Aristophanic comedy that 
the Attic drama from Euripides onwards accompanies the 
development of social life at Athens. Tragedy had now 
run its course, and in the hands of men who disbelieved 
the myths and customary morals upon which it had been 
founded must have tended more and more to run into 
burlesque. In the lyrical tragedies of the aesthete 
Agathon ; in the dramas in which Critias and Dionysius, 
tyrant of Syracuse, aired their speculations on political 
and social topics ; in the plays of Chaeremon, whose 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 213 


Centaur seems to have been “ a compound of epic, lyric, 
and dramatic poetry/’ * and who is called by Aristotle 
“ a poet to be read ,” we may trace the gradual extinction 
of Attic tragedy. The glorious odes of the tragic chorus 
seem to have died away into descriptive and rhetorical 
writing intended rather for the scholar’s eye than the 
public ear ; and this stage-oratory belongs rather to the 
development of Attic prose than to that of Attic verse. 
The rapid decline of tragedy is, in fact, due to the decay 
of those moral characteristics of the Athenian audience 
which had primarily given to tragedy its vital force. 
Even dramatic studies of personal character gradually 
lost their interest when divorced from social sympathy 
and great moral problems ; and soon little remained but 
a spectacular medley enlivened by descriptions of female 
beauty, or natural scenery, or by rhetorical declamation 
of a thoroughly metallic ring. The majestic spirit of 
tragedy departed at the touch of an individualism which 
could only laugh at its own littleness. 

Both the processes we have already observed in the 
development of the tragic drama — the subordination 
of the chorus and the reduction of abstract and heroic 
to human and individual character — are repeated in the 
progress of Attic comedy ; to this progress we shall 
accordingly now turn. The comedy like the tragedy of 
Athens had originated in the choral worship of Bacchus ; 
but the development of the comic chorus seems to have 
been checked by the tyranny of Peisistratus. We know 
little or nothing of the earliest Attic comedians. 
Susarion, who probably flourished in Solon’s time, before 
Thespis ; and Chionides, who is reckoned by Aristotle 
the first of Attic comedians ; even Cratinus, who died 
so late as 423 B.C., and Eupolis, who began to bring out 

# K. O. Muller, But. Gk. Lit. (Donaldson’s translation), vol. i. p. 509. 


214 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


comedies as late as 429 b.c., are for us little more than 
names. We cannot, therefore, recover any such graduated 
change in the chorus and characters of comedy as the 
tragedies of iEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides enable 
us to observe. Still, the eleven extant comedies of 
Aristophanes compared with fragments of later comedians 
and the Latin imitations of the “New Comedy ” made by 
Plautus and Terence, enable us to watch a part of the 
development of comedy at Athens, a part which the 
better-known development of tragedy aids us in under- 
standing. As in tragedy, the comic stage represented an 
open space in the background of which were public and 
private buildings ; as in tragedy, the number of the comic 
actors is limited to three, and masks and gay costumes, 
such as would have been used in the old choral carnival 
of Bacchus, are worn. The chorus, indeed, is almost as 
prominent in the earlier dramas of Aristophanes as in 
iEschylus, and the parabasis, or address of the chorus 
to the audience in the middle of the comedy, whether 
it w r as the nucleus of the comic drama or an after- 
thought, at least marks the chorus as the central figure. 
Out of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes six * 
are named after the chorus ; and though the Thesmo - 
phoriazousas and Ecclesiazousse do not necessarily take 
their names from their choruses of women, they also 
seem to look to the chorus as the centre of the piece. 
No extant play of Aristophanes, not even the Plutus, 
which approaches so closely to the later comedy in its 
want of political allusions, is without a chorus ; but the 
new comedy of Menander and Philemon, which, by bor- 
rowing its characters and incidents from contemporary 

* The Acharniam, the Knights , the Clouds , the Wasps, the Birds , tho 
Frogs. Among non-extant dramas of Aristophanes called after the chorus 
we may name the Babylonians and the Feasters (Dxtaltis). 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 215 

Athenian life, completed the humanising process begun 
by Euripides in tragedy, gave up the choral form alto- 
gether; and even the Middle Comedy, which preceded 
the New, according to a remark of Platonius “ had no 
ptarabasis because there was no chorus.” 

This disappearance of the chorus in comedy may, no 
doubt, have been hastened by the inability of the State 
or the wealthier citizens to meet the choral expenses in 
the days of Athenian decline ; but that the impoverish- 
ment of Athens is in itself no sufficient explanation of 
the disappearance of the chorus, is clear from the fact 
that in the age when comedy and tragedy began and 
were developed in their choral forms Athens was a far 
poorer city than in the days of the Middle and New 
Comedy. The rise and fall of the choral form in comedy 
as well as in tragedy are to be explained by causes more 
deeply connected with average Athenian character than 
the presence or absence of wealth ; and one notable feature 
of the old comedy serves as a guide-post to such causes. 
This feature is the constant use of allegorical and abstract 
personages throughout the Aristophanic comedy ; and 
we shall now illustrate this usage at some length. 

§ 57. In the earliest play of Aristophanes, the Dse- 
taleis* or Fenders , so called after its chorus, “ the chorus 
were conceived as a company of revellers who had 
banqueted in a temple of Hercules (in whose worship 
eating and drinking bore a prominent part), and were 
engaged in witnessing a contest between the old frugal 
and modest system of education and the frivolous and 
talkative education of modern times, in the persons ot 
two young men, Temperate (crwfypwv) and Profligate 
(KaraTTvyuv). Brother Profligate was represented, in a 
dialogue between him and his aged father, as a despiser 
* Performed in b.c. 427, but no longer extant. 


216 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of Homer, as accurately acquainted with legal expressions 
(in order, of course, to employ them in pettifogging 
quibbles), and as a zealous partisan of the sophist 
Thrasymachus, and of Alcibiades, the leader of the 
frivolous youth of the day.” * Passing from this earliest 
but non-extant comedy of Aristophanes to the extant 
Plutus, which came out nearly forty years later (388 B.C.), 
and was “ the last piece which the aged poet brought for- 
ward himself,” we are again met by allegory and allegorical 
personages — Plutus, the god of wealth, Just Man, Poverty. 
The intervening plays of Aristophanes are full of 
similar personages — Demus (People), the old citizen of 
Athens, in whom the Athenians are personified in the 
Knights; Just Argument (Logos) and Unjust Argument, 
in the Clouds , reminding us of such “ characters” as Heresy 
and Understanding in Calderon’s Divine Philothea ; War 
and Tumult in the Peace , itself the name of another 
allegorical personage. Indeed, as any careful reader of 
Aristophanes must have observed, many of his apparently 
real personages dissolve into groups and general types 
the moment we examine them : such are Dicaeopolis in 
the Acharnians and Trygaeus in the Peace , representatives 
of the Athenian peace-party ; Lysistrata, a female repre- 
sentative of the same party, in the Lysistrata ; and 
Praxagora, the female exponent of women’s rights in the 
Ecclesiazousse. In these and other examples Aristophanic 
personages turn out, on closer inspection, not to be 
individuals at all, but only types of a certain class or 
group. In fact, to such a degree does this class character 
prevail in Aristophanes’ plays, that even living persons 
do not seem to be introduced simply as persons, but 
as types of philosophic, poetical, or political thought. 
Thus the name of Socrates is used in the Clouds rather as 
* K. O. Muller, Hist. Git. Lit., vol. ii. p. 21. 


POETIiY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 217 


a class-name for the sophists in general than as the 
proper name of the famous ethical philosopher, with 
whom Aristophanes would seem to have been on very 
friendly terms; and though Euripides and Cleon are 
certainly hit at as persons, no one can read the passages 
in which they are introduced without observing that they 
are also general names, the former for the sophistic 
corrupters of what Aristophanes regarded as the best 
morals and aesthetic taste of Athens, the latter for the 
demagogues who at once flattered and enslaved the 
populace. 

In the dearth of extant Athenian comedies it is, of 
course, impossible to feel certain that this use of abstract 
and allegorical personages is derived from the earliest 
practice of the comic stage. But when it is remembered 
that early Athenian tragedy discloses the same impersonal 
tendency alike in its characters and its ethical principles, 
when it is farther remembered that the group-nature of 
the chorus in comedy as in tragedy easily lends itself to 
impersonal and allegorical uses/ and when the weakness 
of personality is found to be one of the most striking 
points of likeness in all early communities, it may be 
regarded as highly probable that this characteristic of 
the old comedy is to be taken as a survival from the 
early social conditions of Attica through the earliest forms 
of the comic spectacle. Moreover, there is a special 
reason for this survival having become in time the 
peculiar property of the comic drama. In tragedy, so 
long as Athenian average character was rather social than 
individual, character-types were as free from the grotesque 
as Justice, Mercy, or any other abstract personages of the 
medieval morality-play. But just as the development 

* The chorus of the Clouds and that of the JFas^s will sufficiently 
illustrate such usage on the comic stage. 


218 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of individualism in England produced the thoroughly- 
individualised drama of Marlowe, Skakspere, and their 
followers ; just as its inferior development in Spain allowed 
the allegorical personages of Calderon’s autos sacra - 
mentales * to retain their intense interest for a Catholic 
audience ; so its rapid development in Athens made mere 
types of character more and more grotesque, and less and 
less in keeping with serious thought. In this way, far 
more than through any sense of restriction, the habit of 
taking dramatic personages from the early Greek myths 
aided the fall of Attic tragedy ; for though, as has been 
often observed, the tragedians were by no means tied 
down to any one view of a mythical character, their use 
of these types must have strongly militated against the 
seriousness of tragedy as soon as individualism of character 
came to be expected by the audience. Comedy, accord- 
ingly, after a time stepped into the shoes of tragedy, and 
applied to its own purposes the worn-out properties of 
the tragic stage. But the farther progress of Athenian 
individualism (much like the same progress in modern 
Europe) failed to find even a comic interest in typical 
and allegorical personages at all to be compared with the 
ridiculous little units of everyday life, and so the new 
comedians made their own kith and kin the puppets of 
their stage, f 

* Thus in Belshazzar's Feast the dramatis personse are the King 
Belshazzar, Daniel, Idolatry, Vanity, and a curious personage, called “-The 
Thought,” who in the first scene enters, dressed in a coat of many colours, 
as the fool. Among the dramatis personx of the Divine Philolliea are 
Sight, Hearing, Paganism, Judaism. See Denis Florence M‘ Uarthy’s 
translations of these autos sacramentales. 

t Bearing in mind the historical development of the dramatic chorus 
at Athens as given above, we cannot but regard certain imitations of the 
classic form in modern times as singularly incongruous. The introduction 
of the Athenian chorus among the Hebrews in such plays as Racine’s 
Athalie or Milton’s Samson Agonistes is like writing Hebrew ideas for an 
English or French audience in Greek words. Yet the presence of the 
Athenian chorus and stock characters (the K rjpvi; and Messenger, in Samson 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 219 


§ 58. Thus the social development of Athens is 
reflected with peculiar accuracy in her dramatic — a deve- 
lopment from the life of the group to that of the indi- 
vidual, from the ethics of the clan to personal responsi- 
bility, from a spectacle in which groups of men and 
women, or impersonal abstractions, or heroic types pre- 
dominate to a drama of character in which persons 
borrowed from contemporary life humanise the stage. 
In Eome the development of individualism was a slower 
and more confused process; yet even here, in spite of 
Greek imitation and patrician culture, we may find in 
the progress of the drama some marks of social evolution. 
For in Eome, as in Athens, the rude forms of the early 
drama foreshadowed a popular literature; and, had her 
political and social factions amalgamated before her 
acquaintance with Greek civilisation, a truly Eoman 
drama might have been produced. Plainly the old ritual 
of Eome, as in the hymn of the Fratres Arvales previously 
translated, contained, like some of the Vedic hymns, the 
germs of a dramatic spectacle. Eesponsive songs, too, 
like the Fescennine and the triumphal, would aid this 
dramatic tendency; and the absence of epic or lyric 
(personal) poetry would allow greater room for a drama 
of some kind. Professor Teuffel, indeed, tells us that 
“the Eomans possessed a tendency to preserve and 
cherish the recollection of past events, and, as they 
perceived that metre facilitated both recollection and 

Agonistes ) among Hebrew associations never seems to strike critics as out of 
place, though if Ihe Vidushaka, or Buffoon of the Indian drama, had been 
transferred to Athens that incongruity would scarcely have been so great 
as this. But, in truth, the confusion of Hebrew and Greek with modern 
thought has done much, not only to close our eyes to such incongruities, 
but to stop the progress of that historical consciousness which cannot 
exist so long as such confusion is not felt. Of course such imitations of 
the Athenian drama as the Atalanta in Calydon or the Erechllieus are 
free from this charge of incongruity ; for they represent the use of the 
Greek form within the legitimate range of the Greek spirit. 


220 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


tradition, we find here a field favourable to the develop- 
ment of epic poetry.” * But peoples who have never 
developed an epic (the Chinese, for example) have pos- 
sessed in a high degree this “ tendency to cherish the 
recollection of past events,” and the value of metre as a 
support for the memory has been recognised all the world 
over. It would be as absurd to suppose that the fables 
of a Lokman should suffice to create a drama (as Voltaire 
seems to have supposed in his introductory letter to 
L’Orphelin de la Chine) as to think that the use of metre 
and a desire to chronicle the past suffice to create “a 
field favourable to the development of epic poetry.” 
The form and spirit of poetry depend to a large extent 
upon social life; and, as already observed, Niebuhr’s 
theory of an early ballad-poetry (with which the imagi- 
nary epic of early Home has been closely connected) 
strangely overlooks this dependence. The life of the 
city commonwealth is not favourable to the growth of 
epic poetry ; for the heroes of the epic are always exalted 
above the level of human character, always hostile to the 
democratic sentiments of the city. Moreover, the city 
life of Home was peculiarly opposed to the individualised 
spirit of epic poetry ; for the communal organisation of 
the gentes checked the rise of any literary forms in which 
personal character would predominate. We shall, there- 
fore, believe that Roman poetry, if left to itself, would 
have assumed neither the epic nor the lyric, but the 
dramatic form. 

The nature of the early Roman drama, so far as we 
can now recover it by the aid of a few scattered references, 
was exactly such as the social conditions of early Rome 
would lead us to anticipate. This drama (if we may so 
call it) was a comic spectacle in which personal character 
* Hid. Lat. Lit. (Wagner’s translation), vol. i. p. 27. 


FOETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 221 


had little or no place. Thus the Atellane plays (so called 
from Atella, a small town in Campania) admirably suited 
the unindividualised life of early Rome, for their principal 
personages were not “ characters ” in the modern artistic 
sense, but fixed types. Such are Maccus, Pappus, Bucco, 
Dossenus, and the peculiarly Roman Mania, Lamia, Pytho, 
Manducus. Maccus, for example, is a stupid glutton 
wearing ass’s ears ; Pappus, a vain old man constantly 
cheated by his wife and son ; Dossenus, a cunning sharper. 
These typical personages remind us of the Cain * or the 
“ Vice with his dagger of lath in our old morality plays, 
and like them belong to an age in which personality was 
weakly realised. It is to be remembered that the diction 
of the Atellane plays, like that of the Mimes, was plebeian 
— an index to the popular character of these rude dramatic 
spectacles. 

But the plebeians were not destined to be the makers 
of Roman comedy, much less of Roman literature in 
general, nor were sucli types as Maccus and Pappus to 
be individualised by the infernal evolution of Roman 
society. The increase of Roman wealth and consequent 
pressure of strangers to Rome from the era of the First 
Punic War reproduced, but within a relatively narrower 
circle, the effects of the great Persian War on Athenian 
mind; and among the earliest of these effects was the 
discovery of Rome’s literary nakedness compared with 
the intellectual riches of Greece. How to convey some 
of this intellectual wealth to Rome and there give it 
currency became the literary problem of the day; and 

* Shakspere’s expression, “Cain-coloured beard” ( Merry Wives , I. iy.), 
referring to the red hair worn by this stock personage of the morality- 
plays, reminds us of the custom on the Roman stage for old men to appear 
in white wigs (e.< 7 . “ Periplecomenus albicapillus” in the Miles Gloriosus ) 
and slaves in red (e.g. “Si quis me quseret rufus,” iu the Fhormio )— a 
custom probably derived from the typical dresses of the stock personages 
iu the old comedy of Rome. 


222 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


at first the work of borrowing was attempted under a 
Roman dress and apparently in the hope of attracting 
all sorts and conditions of Roman society. Livius An- 
dronicus, a Greek slave brought from Tarentum to Rome 
in 275 b.c., represented his first play in 240 b.c. The 
Livian play would seem to have been a rude performance, 
containing but a slight advance from pantomimic dancing 
towards personal dialogue; for, as Mr. Simcox observes, 
Livius “ originated the curious division of labour whereby 
one actor, commonly himself, danced and acted while 
another, whom the audience were not supposed to see, 
sang the words which he would have sung himself if the 
exertion- of singing and dancing at once had not been 
too overwhelming. Such a device implies that the public 
came for the spectacle, and held the pantomime more 
important than the song; so it is not strange that the 
plays of Livius Andronicus should have been very 
meagre, and that the dialogue should have been very 
little above stage directions, just serving to explain to 
the audience what was going on.” * But Livius was 
something more than a pantomimic dancer; his transla- 
tion of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse shows that he 
was attempting to popularise Greek culture at Rome by 
exhibiting the Greek Muses in the coarse garb of the 
Italian Camenoe. In this bold attempt to assimilate 

* Even these performances of Livius, however, would seem to have 
been a considerable improvement on the older spectacles. Among these, 
the Saturx appear to have been performances of the country clowns of 
Latium, in which separate songs or comic stories were sung or recited, with 
gesticulation and dancing, to the accompaniment of a tihia ; their subjects 
were more varied than those of the Fescenninx. The Mimes were 
performed by one principal actor; while in the Atellanx “only the 
general plot was arranged, the rest being left to improvisation.” The 
form of the Atellanae “may be presumed to have been in most cases a 
simple dialogue, songs iu Saturnian metre being perhaps interspersed; 
the jokes were coarse, accompanied by lively gesticulation which was 
also obscene.” See Teuffel’s Hist. Lat. Lit. 


TOETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 


223 


the Greek to the Roman spirit rather than the Roman 
to the Greek, Naevius, whom Plantus, in the Miles 
Gloriosus, calls an “un- Greek poet,” followed the example 
of Livius. A native of Campania, the home of the 
Atellame, Naevius brought out his first play at Rome 
in 235 B.c. ; and, though his works were mainly comic 
translations from the Greek, his desire to Romanise Greek 
culture will be seen not only from his introduction of the 
pnetexta, or drama based on Roman history, two speci- 
mens of which ( Clastidium and Romulus ) are known to 
us by name, but also from his celebrated epic on the 
First Punic War, written in Saturnian verse. 

§ 59. But this effort to Romanise the Greek spirit was 
necessarily a failure. Greek literature in general, and 
the drama in particular, had long been the expression of 
an intensely individualised life ; and in the comedies of 
Philemon, Menander, Diphilus, subtle analyses of personal 
character had banished the heroic types of the old 
Athenian stage, while the display of personal motives 
exactly reflected a state of society in which the ephemeral 
life of the individual had swallowed up all thoughts of 
common destiny. The development of legal status at 
Rome (so far as we can now recover it) proves, indeed, 
that the gentile and family life of the patricians had 
advanced some way towards individualism before Greek 
thought acquired any considerable influence at Rome. 
But this slow progress was now to be expedited by con- 
tact with a spirit centuries its senior in evolution. Not 
only, therefore, was it impossible to bring down the Greek 
spirit to the level of the Roman, as Livius and Naevius 
had hoped to do, but only Romans whose social and 
political eminence allowed them wider and deeper 
experiences than most of their fellow-citizens could 
appreciate the new modes of thought so unlike those 


224 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of their native city. Hence it was to be expected from 
the first that the development of literature would fall 
into the hands of the upper classes as soon as Greek 
influences acquired their certain mastery at Home. It 
was also to be expected that the drama — a form of 
literature which loses its vitality in proportion as it 
becomes the property of a class — would undergo some 
strange transformation in passing from its Bomau cradle 
into the adult life of the Hew Comedy. Since this trans- 
formation, so far as the present writer is acquainted, is 
unparalleled* in the literary history of the world, and 
illustrates the progressive individualisation of Koman 
life, we shall discuss its nature at some length. 

The great difficulties which Livius and Haevius had 
experienced in their attempts to Bomanise the Greek 
drama had been the rude form and spirit of Boman 
literature in its “ barbarous ” state. The Saturnian 
measure was altogether inadequate to translate the 
Greek metres. Character-types, like Manducus, were 
altogether inadequate to express Greek personality. 
Were Greek metres, Greek characters, Greek ideas of 
place and time, to be transferred en masse from Athens 
to Borne? And, if all this had to be done, how were 
Boman associations to be kept from intruding when the 
language used was to be Latin and not Greek ? These 
were the problems which Plautus faced and Terence 
solved; and it is because the plays of the former 
represent the transition from the Boman to the Greek 

* The Japanese drama is by some supposed to have been borrowed 
from the Chinese ; but, even granting the truth of this supposition, these 
Eastern dramas are not sufficiently developed, and do not reflect states of 
society sufficiently developed, to be compared with the dramatic relations 
of Rome and Greece. And if the influence of the French drama on the 
Russian be cited as a parallel, we must remember that this influence 
of the French lias been modified by that of the English and German 
dramas. 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 225 

associations that they are especially interesting to the 
scientific student of literature. 

To touch upon the Plautine metre first, as the formal 
mark of this transition, all students of Plautus know 
that the main reason why his scansion is so difficult to 
ears accustomed to Vergilian and Horatian metres, is 
that in his plays the old accentual scansion, on which 
the Saturnian measure was based, modifies and occasion- 
ally overrides the Greek scansion by quantity ; just as 
the mixture of accentual and syllabic scansion in Chaucer 
would seem to mark the junction of Saxon and Norman 
literatures. But the spirit of the Plautine comedy is 
even more distinctly transitional than the form. In the 
prologue to the Casina the difficulty of depicting the 
manners of a foreign country in such a way as to retain 
truth yet interest the spectators is clearly illustrated. 
Two slaves of the same household are seeking in marriage 
their fellow-slave ; but, the marriage of slaves being 
unknown to the Romans, the difficulty must be explained. 
“I suppose,” says the speaker of the prologue, “that 
some present are now talking thus among themselves : 
‘Faith, what’s this now? Slaves’ marriage? Would 
slaves be marrying or asking a wife for themselves ? 
They’ve introduced a new thing that happens nowhere 
in the world.’ (Novum attulerunt quod fit nusquani 
gentium.) But I assert that this is done in Greece and 
Carthage, and here, too, in our own country in Apulia ; 
in these places slaves’ marriages are usually looked after 
even more carefully than those of freemen.”* 

* Professor Tyrrell, in the introduction to his excellent edition of the 
Miles Gloriosus , observes with truth that the Plautine prologues are, as a 
rule, spurious, containing sometimes (as in those of the Casina , Asinaria, 
Menxchmi , Pseudolus ) references to Plautus of a kind which would seem 
to imply that he was no longer living. But, though the prologue of the 
Casina may not have been written by Plautus, the introduction of manners 


226 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Truthfulness to time and place and social character 
must have been forced upon the Roman playwright by 
this constant necessity of realising his dramatis person se 
in the midst of conditions different from those of the 
audience to which they spoke. Thus, the use of the 
Phoenician language by Hanno in the Poenulus is to be 
partially explained by this constant contrast which must 
have produced the desire of realism on a minute scale. 
In the Indian drama a like effect was produced by similar 
causes, viz. the use of different languages or dialects by 
the dramatis personas, and the introduction of personages 
in character and language very different from the 
educated Brahman. Just as the Plautine comedy — as 
is proved not only by its Greek names, characters, places, 
but also by its Greek phrases, words, puns — is addressed 
to an audience thoroughly familiar with Greek language 
and life, and by its nature puts the playwright on his 
guard against untruthful descriptions, so the Indian 
drama, being addressed, as is expressly stated in the 
prelude to Malali and Mddhava , to the Brahmans, aimed 
at exact truth of language and character beyond the 
circle of the sacred caste. Technical Indian writers on 
the drama, clearly expressing the influences of caste in 
their conceptions of dramatic propriety, note with care 
the exact kind of sentiments proper to each character — 
a propriety which plainly reduces character to what in 
the East it has commonly been, a type. In Plautus we 
have also types, side by side with real characters such 
as Tyndarus in the Captivi ; for not only are the leno, 
meretrix, coquus, sycophanta, parasite, stock characters, 
but we have such allegorical personages as the Lar in 

in the play out of keeping with social life in Rome is not affected, and the 
need of an apology for such an introduction, whether it was felt by the 
author himself or by some later producers of the play, is likewise not 
affected. 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 227 

the Aulularia , Auxilium in the GisteUaria , Arcturus in 
the Rudens , Luxuria and Inopia in the Trinumus . As 
we shall find elsewhere, the Indian rules both on pro- 
priety of typical characters and on propriety of language 
altogether surpass anything Plautine comedy could 
enable us to conceive ; and, no doubt, this Indian realism 
of language and character is due to causes some of which 
are peculiar to India — the sacred classical tongue, the 
great variety of dialects, the presence of caste. Still 
the Indian drama will aid us in realising the conditions 
under which Plautus wrote. For just as in the Indian 
drama character is more typical than personal in our 
European sense, so in that state of Roman society in 
which the patrician gentes and familids supplied as perfect 
a substitute for the Indian’s castes as European history 
can offer, we can easily see why Plautus should have 
preferred types to persons whenever they would suit his 
Greek stage ; and just as realism of language and character 
forced itself on Indian critics from the sharply contrasted 
social conditions which the dramatists sought to personify 
on the stage, so the perpetual contrast of Greek manners 
and ideas with the Roman language he employed made 
the Roman dramatist, at least in the Poenulus, more 
truthful to language than dramatic art permits. 

Plautus, however, is by no means quite at home in 
the expression of Greek thought and action through the 
words and phrases of Rome’s language. Technical 
phrases of Roman law meet us sometimes in his Athenian 
scenes, and remind us that we are really near the Forum, 
not the Ekklesia. But the plays of Terence, with their 
smooth diction and thoroughly Greek associations, show 
the transition from the Romano-Greek to the purely 
Greek spirit to be a fait accompli. The efforts of Livius, 
Naevius, and to some degree even Plautus,, had failed; 

11 


228 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the Greek drama had not been and could not have been 
Romanised either in form or spirit. In the hands of 
Terence, comedy became the expression of a polished 
class of Grascised Romans and gave up the attempt 
to be popular ; at the same time, it made a quiet protest 
against patrician exclusiveness and the old strictness 
of the Roman familia by bringing the freedom of the 
Greek citizen directly before the eyes of the class whose 
wealth and power made them the patrons of literature. 

It has been said with truth that “all the plays of 
Terence are written with a purpose; and this purpose 
is the same which animated the political leaders of free 
thought.” When it is remembered that the aim of 
Terence was “to base conduct upon reason rather than 
tradition, and paternal authority upon kindness rather 
than fear,” we may find a distinct reason for the repetition 
of certain characters in his plays. If his characters may 
be easily classified (as Terence himself in the prologue 
to the Eunuchus classifies them), if they look not so much 
like individuals as types of social and domestic relation- 
ships, these features are to be attributed to the influence 
of family life at Rome, and Terence’s desire to remind 
his audience of family relations incomparably less servile 
than those which turned on the patria potestas . A 
Carthaginian by birth, Terence published his first play, 
the Andria, in 166 B.C., and his last, the Adelphoe, in 
160 b.c. The six comedies which represent this short 
dramatic career enable us to note various important 
changes in the tone of Roman culture. In his metres, 
language, and careful exclusion of Roman associations 
of place, time, incident, Terence breathes the spirit of the 
Grmcised Roman, while Plautus, in spite of Greek metres 
and associations, has still something of the Romanised 
Greek about him. The literary refinement of Terence’s 


POETUY OP THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 229 


language, which made his comedies even more influential 
as works to be read than as plays to be acted, his 
prologues dealing critically with the form or spirit of the 
drama, the absence of burlesque in his characters, and 
even the very names of his dramatis personse* show that 
we have left the popular spectacle and entered the 
refined theatre of an educated class. 

§ 60. But in these thoroughly Greek associations 
of the Terentian stage we may close our brief review 
of the progress of dramatic art in Rome. Terence, the 
slave from Carthage, drawing exact pictures of Greek 
life in the language of Rome for the edification of an 
audience which thinks Greek, transforms the drama into 
as curious a literary exotic as can be easily conceived. 
If such was the end of Rome’s rude native comedy, in 
tragedy the Romans were from the first dependent on 
the Greeks. Without common mythology, without bonds 
of common religion, the divided city of plebeian and 
patrician could feel none of the public sentiments out 
of which tragedy arose at Athens. If a tragedy based 

* Many names of the Plautine characters explain themselves — such 
are Artotrogus, “ Breadeater,” the parasite in Miles Gloriosus ; Poly- 
machseroplagidcs, “ Macmanyswordblows,” the boastful soldier in 
Pseudolus ; Anthrax, “Coalman,” the cook in Aulularia. In Terence, 
on the contrary, the same name, “Chremes,” for example, is used for 
totally different characters, and of course without any meaning being 
conveyed by the name. The dramatic use of names intended to convey 
their own meaning is, in fact, a sign that character-drawing is subordinated 
to types; hence the constant use of such names in Aristophanes. In 
Mr. Ruskin’s extravagant attempt to find meanings in Shakspere’s 
dramatic names — Desdemona, Sva-Satfiovia, “miserable fortune,” Hamlet, 
“ homely,” Iago, “ the supplanter,” and so on — we have much more than 
a “note of provinciality in the highest excess,” as Mr. Matthew Arnold 
has said ; we have in it a complete failure to grasp the difference between 
characterisation through the medium of types and characterisation through 
the medium of individual personality, the latter and not the former being 
the essential feature of Shaksperian art. The characters in the Canterbury 
Tales are indeed types of social life in the England of Chaucer ; but in 
the England of Shakspere and on the Shaksperian stage men and women 
possess an individuality impossible in the days of medieval guilds and 
serfage. 


230 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


on the ethics of clan life had been started in early Rome, 
it would have possessed nothing to interest and every- 
thing to repel the general body of the Roman populace; 
and such heroes as it exhibited must have summoned 
up recollections which no plebeian could have felt with- 
out shame and indignation. Common sympathies of 
religion, patriotism, social unity, being impossible, Rome 
had to borrow her tragedy from the Greeks, and for the 
service of that Greek spirit which was at once peculiarly 
attractive for the upper classes and the destroyer of their 
traditional thought. It was not the first or the last time 
that possessors of property became the disseminators 
of ideas fatal to their own ascendency ; Athens had seen 
much of this social suicide, the Paris of the eighteenth 
century was to see much more of it. But patrician bonds 
of social duty and clan conceptions of sympathy and 
obligation were now out of keeping with the widened 
circle of Roman life, as much as the traditional morality 
of the Hebrew clans was out of keeping with ideas of 
personal responsibility in Ezekiel’s age, as much as the 
traditional morality of primitive Athens was out of 
keeping with the expanded associations of the Periclean 
age. The discussion of Euripides whether men owe their 
character to inborn nature (Qvmg) or education, the 
repudiation of inherited sin by Ezekiel, and a famous 
line of Terence’s Hautontimoroumenos — “ Homo sum ; 
humani nihil a me alienuin puto ” — alike mark in their 
respective social groups the clash between an ethic of 
narrow sympathies and conditions of social life too wide 
and too complex to be ruled by the old morality. 

The line of Terence just quoted may be treated as 
the text of a new gospel at Rome, a gospel for which 
legal relaxations of old patrician exclusiveness had 
previously opened a way. This gospel of humanitas , 


POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH. 231 

expressed on the legal side by appeals to the Jus 
Naturale (a fusion, as Sir Henry Maine has so well 
explained, of the old Jus Gentium of Rome with the 
vofxoQ (J>v(jewq of the Greek Stoics), was on the literary side 
expressed by the scepticism of Ennius (209-169 b.c.), 
Pacuvius (220-132 b.c.), and, in lesser degree, Accius 
(170-94 B.c.). To these tragic poets Euripides supplied 
the same recurring model as Menander had supplied to 
the comedians. In their tragedies the strongly indi- 
vidualised spirit of Euripidean Athens was transferred 
to the home of men under the lifelong sway of the 
father's power, and women never freed from perpetual 
tutelage. The friendship of Ennius and Scipio Africanus 
symbolises the union of this individualised literature 
with the growth of personal independence from all 
restraints of gens or familia ; and Ennius' translation 
of Euemerus (the rationaliser of the Greek myths) ex- 
presses almost as clearly as his denial of a guiding 
providence in human affairs that purely personal concep- 
tion of destiny which is fatal to every kind of social 
creed. “ But superstitious seers and brazen-faced sooth- 
sayers," says Ennius in one of his plays,* “lazy or mad, 
or forced by poverty, men who cannot see the path for 
themselves, point out the way for others, and ask a 
drachma from those to whom they promise wealth." In 
another fragment of the play which contains this vigorous 
attack on the seers and soothsayers of the old Roman 
religion, Ennius speaks thus : “ A race of gods there 
is, I said, and always shall declare, but I think they care 
not what the human race is doing ; for, if they cared, 
the good should get the good things and the evil bad, 
which is not so." Evidently communal morality and 
slavery proved in Rome as fatal to the future life as 
* The Telamo. 


232 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


a sanction for personal conduct as they had proved in 
Athens. Pacuvius, in the same spirit as Ennius, finds 
the ruler of human life to be Temeritas or Chance ; and 
if Accius, who lived late enough for Cicero to converse 
with him, displayed some tenderness for the old super- 
stitions of Rome, this apparent relapse was probably due 
to the discovery that the nihilism of Greek thought 
could find intellectual weapons at least as readily for 
the communism of a Gracchus as for the literary taste of 
a Scipio. 

Thus, in spite of its imitative character, the drama 
of Rome derives its true interest from Rome’s social life, 
and reflects the evolution of that life in a manner not 
to be mistaken. No greater dramatic contrast can be 
well conceived than that between a play of Euripides or 
Pacuvius, full of personal destiny and veiled or open 
disbelief in the gods and common creed, and the Indian 
drama, which in its very form (as in the benediction with 
which it opens) bears witness to the overwhelming 
influence of religious and caste ideas. Yet the starting- 
points of the Athenian and Roman dramas, especially the 
former, are by no means far removed from those of the 
Indian. What makes the dramas of Athens and Rome, 
however, so much more interesting than any of the 
Eastern world is the social evolution which underlies their 
progress. In the comparatively stationary life of India 
or China, there was little scope for such evolution or its 
dramatic influences; but in the narrow range of the 
Aryan city commonwealth we have an opportunity for 
watching dramatic variations of form and spirit closely 
in accordance with the development of a social life not 
too wide to be confusing, and not so rapid in its changes 
as to obscure the relations of cause and effect. 


BOOK IV. 

WORLD-LITERATURE. 




CHAPTER I. 


WHAT IS WORLD-LITERATURE ? 

§ 61. The fundamental facts in literary evolution are 
the extent of the social group and the characters of the 
individual units of which it is composed. So long as 
social and individual life moves within the narrow 
associations of the clan, or of the city commonwealth, 
the ideal range of human sympathy is proportionately 
restricted. It is true that the clan life of the Hebrews 
supplied in its Berith or League, in its communal 
associations of property and descent, the central con- 
ceptions of a national ideal. It is true that the city 
of the Greeks supplied the ideal of Greek centralism 
as of Greek local patriotism. But before the larger 
destinies of humanity as a whole could come home to 
either Hebrew or Greek minds, the associations of the 
clan and the city commonwealth alike required to be 
widened by enlarged spheres of social action. This ex- 
pansion among tribal communities like the Hebrews and 
Arabs leads to religious cosmopolitanism, to an ideal of 
human unity deeply social in its character, and strictly 
confined within the circle of a common creed. A similar 
expansion in municipal communities like Athens and 
Rome leads to political cosmopolitanism, to an ideal of 
human unity within a circle of common culture whose 
peace is secured by centralised force and whose character 


236 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


is intensely individual. Between the world-religions 
of Israel and Islam and the world-cultures of Alexandria 
and Borne there are, no doubt, very wide differences. 
Yet, though the former reach universality through social 
bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through 
the unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both 
is to rise above old restrictions of place and time, and 
to render possible a literature which, whether based on 
Moses or Homer, may best be termed a “ world-literature.” 

What, then, is world-literature ? What are the 
marks by which it may be known ? What is its proper 
place in the evolution of literature ? 

The leading mark of world-literature has been already 
stated ; it is the severance of literature from defined social 
groups — the universalising of literature, if we may use 
such an expression. Such a process may be observed 
in the Alexandrian and Roman, the later Hebrew and 
Arab, the Indian and Chinese, literatures ; and this 
universalism, though differing profoundly in its Eastern 
and Western conceptions of personality, is alike in the 
East and West accompanied by the imitation of literary 
work wrought out in days when the current of social 
life was broken up into many narrow channels foaming 
down uplands of rock and tree. Closely connected with 
this imitation of early models is the reflective and critical 
spirit, which is another striking characteristic of world- 
literature. Language now becomes the primary study 
of the literary artist, and the causes of his devotion to 
words are not difficult to discover. Just as the language 
of Hebrew life, in its struggle with Northern and Southern 
invasion, and in its own internal break-up, underwent 
a gradual change which necessitated the production 
of Targums, or Paraphrases of the Law, Prophets, and 
Writings, and thus led to a scrupulously exact study 


WHAT IS WORLD-LITERATURE? 


237 


of the sacred texts; just as the Sanskrit, in the course 
of likewise becoming a dead language, roused that spirit 
of grammatical criticism for which India from early 
times has been famous; so among Greeks, Romans, and 
Arabs deterioration in language was met by the rise 
of verbal criticism. The triumph of Islam occasioned 
the corruption of Arabic by making it the official tongue 
of the conquered, and turned later Arab literature into 
a pedantic study of classical words which exactly repro- 
duces the Alexandrian spirit. Magdani, a contemporary 
of the famous Hariri, collected and explained Arab 
proverbs precisely in the manner of Suidas ; and Hariri’s 
MaJcamat, in their forced display of erudition, deserve 
comparison with the Cassandra of Lycophron. . This 
development of linguistic criticism, among the Arabs, 
as a consequence of their world-wide conquests, illustrates 
the need of Alexandrian criticism, when the conquests 
of Alexander had made the Greek a world-language and 
proportionately increased the danger of its being corrupted 
into barbarous jargons. The corruption of Arabic in 
foreign lands also illustrates the necessity which Roman 
writers experienced of setting up a refined standard of 
speech, opposed at once to plebeian coarseness and to 
provincial barbarism. The need and value of gram- 
matical studies at Rome may be estimated by the de- 
terioration of language which set in after the Augustan 
age. “ In the first century of the Imperial period,” says 
Professor Teuffel, “ prose begins already to decay by 
being mixed with poetical diction, and becoming estranged 
from natural expression. The decay of accidence and 
syntax begins also about this time. Later on the plebeian 
element found admission ; and when the influence of 
provincial writers, who were not guided by a native 
sense of the language, and who mixed up the diction 


238 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and style of all periods, became prevalent in literature, 
the confusion became still greater.” It can be easily 
understood how the classical language of India, likewise, 
in its conflict with a great variety of local dialects, came 
to depend more on the verbal criticism of grammarians 
than on that creative originality which in our days of 
national languages, stereotyped by the aid of printing 
and widely diffused education, is rightly accounted so 
much more valuable than the study of words. 

But, besides the universal idea of humanity and the 
critical study of language as the medium of sacred books 
or models of literary art, there is a third characteristic 
of world-literature which to our modern European minds 
is perhaps the most interesting. This is the rise of 
new aesthetic appreciations of physical nature and its 
relations to man. Among the Hebrews and Arabs, it 
is true, we cannot observe this characteristic of world- 
literature so distinctly as elsewhere. For the Hebrews 
the idea of Yahveh was so closely connected with physical 
conceptions — sunshine, storm, rain, lightning, thunder — 
that the sights and sounds of Nature were scarcely 
realisable save through the creator-god of his peculiar 
people. The Allah of the Arabs is even a closer 
approach to that One Unhuman Power which modern 
science tends to reduce into an Impersonal Force ; more- 
over, the Arabs, while, like the Hebrews, prevented from 
treating Nature as distinct from the Deity, found the 
proper subjects of their literature within the limits of 
the Qur an’s language and ideas. But in India, China, 
Greece, and Italy it was otherwise. Indian poetry, for 
example, through the medium of its polytheistic religion, 
could deify physical nature without offending religious 
feelings. The myths of early Greece had been closely 
connected with physical nature ; and, though the city 


WHAT IS WORLD-LITERATURE? 


239 


commonwealth tended to humanise and rationalise these 
myths, they remained, even in the days of Greek world- 
literature, a treasure-house from which Theocritus, 
Moschus, and Bion could bring forth things new and 
old for those who were tired of the crowded and dusty 
thoroughfares of Alexandria. Italy, indeed, had no real 
mythology of her own, and the purely practical value 
attached to agricultural life by the old Romans was fatal 
to any poetical sentiment of Nature; yet in the world - 
empire of Rome also we find the poet turning away from 
man to physical nature, and, though the inspiration of 
Lucretius may smack too much of the savant , and that 
of Vergil too much of manuals de re rusticd , we are justified 
in regarding the world-literature of Rome, like that of 
India or Greece, as a witness to the sentiment of Nature 
in man. 

But here w'e must draw a distinction between some 
of the world-literatures known to history and others. 
No doubt the habit of realising humanity as a whole 
accustoms the mind to the contrast between man and 
physical nature, and sets it the difficult task of reconciling 
the claims of each ; but the social conception of humanity 
is connected with physical nature in a different manner 
from the individual conception. Wherever the idea of 
personality as distinct from all social ties has been 
reached, the aspects of the physical world are and must 
be altered. Hence the great differences between the 
sentiment of Nature as manifested in the Graeco-Latin 
literature of Alexandria and Rome, and the same senti- 
ment as manifested in the literatures of India and China. 
In the latter no separate relation between each individual 
and the physical world is observed ; all is social, and 
differences of human personality do not obtrude them- 
selves between the world of Man and the world of Nature. 


240 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


But in the former the isolated feelings of individuals, 
their personal loves, their personal pains and pleasures, 
are brought into constant contrast or comparison with 
Nature’s life. The Western idyll is a “picture-poem” 
of dramatic and descriptive character curiously differing 
from such abstract, social, and impersonal poetry as India 
offers in abundance ; and, whatever the origin of the idyll 
may have been, its essential features — dramatic perception 
of individual character and picturesque description of 
physical nature — show how differently the individualism 
of the West looks upon Nature, compared with the 
monotheistic social view of Hebrews and Arabs and the 
polytheistic social view of Indians and Chinese.* 

But, though it may be readily admitted that in the 
history of the world there have been certain social stages 
sufficiently similar in the literature they produced and 
the conditions of their literary production to warrant 
our use of the word “world-literature,” it may be said 
that our order of treatment — after the literatures of the 
city commonwealth and before those of the nation — is 
not in harmony with prevailing ideas of literary develop- 
ment. Why not pass, it may be asked, from the city 
commonwealth to the nation, and from national literatures 
reach the universalism of world-literature? No doubt 
much might be said for this arrangement if the 
philosophy of ancient Greece, if the language, law, and 
religion of ancient Borne, were not so closely inter- 
twined with the growth of our European nationalities; 
if their social and political progress had not been so 
profoundly affected by the world-wide ideas of ltoman 

* M. Victor de Laprade (Le Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modernes , 
p. 216) notes the vastness and profundity of the Indian sentiment of 
Nature and contrasts it in these respects with the Greek. The source 
of the difference is plainly to be found in the individualism of Greek 
contrasted with the socialism of Indian life. 


WHAT IS WORLD-LITERATURE ? 


241 


law and the Christian religion. But, since it is clearly 
impossible to treat of national progress in Europe without 
allowing great weight to these powerful influences, it 
would be highly inconvenient to pass from the city 
commonwealtli to those national groups whose internal 
and external developments have owed so much to days 
of world-empire and world-literature. We shall, accord- 
ingly, examine the literary characteristics of the latter 
before we approach the national groups. 


242 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CHAPTER IL 

THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 

§ 62. The relations of imagination and reason to forms 
of social life present or suggest great problems which 
have never received a tithe of the attention they deserve. 
Although it is impossible to separate these two great 
faculties of the human mind, although at their ex- 
tremities, so to speak, they fade into one another in 
a manner which seems, and perhaps must always be, 
inscrutable, yet to distinguish them in general outline, 
without attempting minute distinctions, is not impossible. 
Perhaps the essential features of imagination are two — 
the building up of generalisations and abstractions out 
of individual facts, and the transition from the individual 
self to the collective conception of humanity on a more 
or less extensive scale. Similarly, perhaps, the essential 
features of reason may be stated as the analysis of 
generalisations and abstractions into individual facts, and 
the transition from the social or collective conceptions 
of action and thought to the individual. If we accept 
some such view of imagination and reason, we shall be 
able to explain that decadence of imagination which 
Macaulay, in his essay on Dryden, elevates into a general 
law of literary progress. Macaulay failed to observe the 
dependence of imagination upon social sympathies, a 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 243 


dependence which Chateaubriand and Shelley have alike 
hinted, but without any attempt at logical explanation. 
When the author of the Genie du Christianisme maintains 
that the principal cause of the decadence of taste and 
genius is unbelief, he perhaps unwittingly lays his finger 
on a principle which may be illustrated far beyond the 
range of Christian influences. A common creed, whether 
it be that of Christianity or any other system, rests, and 
must rest, on the belief of men in their fellow-men, on 
the sympathy of man with man, on the extension of 
man’s pains and pleasures beyond the narrow circle of his 
personal being, within which he may be a god or a 
“glorious devil,” but never the possessor of a creed. 
Moreover, since any literature deserving of the name 
must address itself to a community of human hopes 
and fears however narrow, the disbelief of man in his 
neighbour, which cuts away all sympathies, also paralyses 
the workings of imagination in its efforts to pass from the 
individual to a wider and greater world. Shelley, in his 
Defence of Poetry , has expressed this truth in words 
worthy of quotation, especially as coming from the pen 
of one whose conception of Christianity, and indeed of 
all creeds, was so different from that of Chateaubriand. 
“ A man, to be greatly good,” says Shelley, “ must 
imagine intensely and comprehensively ; he must put 
himself in the place of another and of many others ; the 
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. 
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. 
Poetry and the principle of self, of which money is the 
visible incarnation, are respectively the God and Mammon 
of the world. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friend- 
ship, what were the scenery of this beautiful world which 
we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the 
grave and what our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did 


244 : 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal 
regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare 
not ever soar ? . . . These and corresponding conditions of 
being are experienced principally by persons of the most 
delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination ; 
and the state of mind produced by them is at war with 
every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, 
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such 
emotions ; and while they last self appears as what it 
is, an atom to a universe. The most unfailing herald, 
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great 
people to work a beneficial change in opinion or 
institution is poetry. At such periods there is an 
accumulation of the power of communicating and re- 
ceiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting 
man and nature.” 

The periods which followed the fall of Athens in 
Greece were eminently unfavourable to this unity of 
social feelings which forms the groundwork of imagination 
and poetry. The break-up of social ties and the substi- 
tution of action from self-interest had resulted from the 
decay of old Athenian morality at the touch of associations 
far wider than early Athens had ever known ; and now, 
when her political power was reduced, expansion of social 
and political ideas as a matter of theory continued. In 
three different directions the improvement of prose, the 
proper vehicle of philosophic individualism, was being 
carried on. The practical oratory of the law-court and 
assembly was being advanced to a perfection which in 
Demosthenes, the last great representative of practical 
Athenian politics, attained its highest point. The art of 
speech-making, in the hands of the cosmopolitan theorist 
Isokrates, had established the normal shape of Greek 
prose. In the dialogues of Plato the destructive logic 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 245 

of the sophists had resulted in an attempt to reconstruct 
the moral and political union of citizens out of universal 
principles in place of local and antiquated traditions. 
Like the political reconstructions of Isokrates, the 
philosophic reconstruction of social life contemplated 
by Plato looked to the whole range of Greek life, and did 
not attempt to glide back into days of narrow isolation 
beyond which the expansion of Greek intellect had now 
for ever passed. At the same time, the relations of the 
individual to the group, relations which the general 
loosening of social ties was rendering sharply distinct, 
became the great questions to which philosophy addressed 
itself. In the highly poetical and imaginative style of 
Plato these questions are put, directly or indirectly, again 
and again. Is human action to be regulated by eternal 
principles of justice or by personal self-interest? Is there 
a sanction for personal morality in a future state of per- 
sonal reward or punishment ? Does the government of 
the State properly belong to a few wisely experienced 
persons or to the many ? Such are some of the Platonic 
problems in which the new Greek consciousness, social 
and personal, is expressed. 

Perhaps the relations of the individual to the group 
are nowhere so curiously realised by Plato as in the social 
classification laid down in his Republic. Instead of 
accepting such classes as the social life of Athens might 
have supplied — freeman, metoec, slave — and thus antici- 
pating the process by which English economists have 
built up their theories on a classification supplied by 
English life — landlord, capitalist, labourer; instead of 
adopting a plan like that of the Brahman redacteurs of 
the Code Manu, viz. that of accepting certain existing 
classes, but arranging them according to religious theory ; 
Plato sets out from an analysis of individual psychology 


246 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


which he applies to the classification of the State. The 
individual soul he regards as composed of the appetite 
(t? TiOvfiia), naturally wild but capable of being tamed ; 
the spirit (flejudc), courageous though capable of both 
good and evil ; and the guiding intelligence (voue), the 
source of wisdom and culture. This analysis of individual 
being Plato transfers to social life, and finds in his State 
(which, to apply the expression of Milton, is simply the 
citizen “ writ large ”) three classes corresponding with 
these three elements of individuality. The philosophers, 
to whom he would intrust the government of his State, 
represent it’s vouc; the warriors or military class, its 
Ov/mog ; the mob, its tTriOu/uia* 

Plato’s ideal communism of wives and property in 
his Utopia has recently met with apologists who would 
reduce the former to a State control of marriage and 
education, and remind us of the limited range within 
which the latter was to be confined. But for us the 
really significant fact is that Plato’s ideal communism 
clearly results from his observing how personal inequali- 
ties of property had contributed to destroy the old Greek 
union of citizen and city, the State and its individual 
units. Men who agree with Aristotle’s criticism on this 
ideal communism will do well to remember the social 
conditions which suggested that ideal, especially when we 
find similar conditions in Hebrew society producing, not 
merely an ideal Utopia, but organisations, like that of the 
Essenes, aiming at a practical return to the communism 
of the old Hebrew village community. 

§ 63. But while the enlargement of Athenian ideas 
and the development of prose were leading to the sever- 
ance of science from literature in Aristotle’s dry theorising 
and collections of facts, the heart of literature was being 
* Seo Iiep. } bk. iv. 440 E., etc. Cf. Ilist Gk. Lit-, Muller, vol. ii. p. 245. 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 247 


eaten away by the growth of an individualism which 
more and more was coming to regard itself as linked with 
social existence solely through the fact of common govern- 
ment, that is, by chains not of sympathy but of force. 
Lyric and epic poetry had in the city commonwealth 
given way to the drama ; and when the old morality and 
political freedom, upon which Athenian comedy and 
tragedy had been based, were weakened, almost the only 
scope for a new Athenian poetry lay in the direction of a 
new drama of some sort. Tragedy, of course, this new 
drama could not be; for not only had the old morality 
been undermined, but the hero-worship which old Athenian 
tragedy expressed was impossible in a society of individual 
units, equally assertive of their own personal merits and 
distrustful of any character transcending the very limited 
degree of greatness which their own associations rendered 
probable. Comedy, on the other hand, was admirably 
suited to such a society ; not, indeed, the comedy of 
Aristophanes, with its extravagant political caricature, 
its allegorical or typical characters, through which satire 
on classes and individuals is conveyed, but the comedy 
of contemporary life and manners, in which analysis of 
individual character could be wrought out in a spirit of 
polished ridicule resembling that of Moliere. It is usual 
to say that the “ Middle ” comedy of Athens, exchanging 
a tone of philosophic and literary criticism for the political 
farce of the old comedy and losing the chorus, lasts from 
about 390 b.c. to 320, Antiphanes, Alexis, Araros, being 
its chief makers ; and to date the “ New ” comedy of 
manners, with its stock characters of father, son, parasite, 
soldier of fortune, as beginning about 320 B.c., its chief 
makers being Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and termi- 
nating about 250 b.c. But any such exact limits are 
artificial. Our real interest lies not in these uncertain 


248 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


distinctions, but in the general lines taken by the 
Attic drama in its decadence, and the causes of this 
course. 

In its descent from the ideal worlds of the old tragedy 
and comedy, the world of heroes struggling against fate 
and the world of uproarious burlesque, the Attic drama 
of contemporary life found two great obstacles to a truly 
profound analysis of human character — the presence of 
slavery and the low intellectual status of Attic free 
women. In a city of twenty-one thousand free citizens 
reposing on the labours of some four hundred thousand 
slaves, a city in which out of every twenty human beings 
you met at least eighteen would be chattels bought and 
sold in open market, the variety of human character 
which so largely arises from free diversity of social 
pursuits must have been greatly limited. Moreover, 
these limits were narrowed still farther by the almost 
servile dependence of Attic free women. The speeches 
of Isseus, which shed many interesting lights on the 
Attic family relations, show us that, though an Athenian 
could not disinherit his son nor separate his estate from 
his daughter, he could choose the person whom his 
daughter might marry ; and her position when married 
was not greatly superior to that of the Homan wife sub 
manu viri. And when we turn from the forensic orator 
to the philosophers of Greece we meet the same depen- 
dence of women. Though Plato in his caste of guards 
proposes the equal treatment of the sexes, his idea of 
temporary marriage would hardly have suggested itself 
save in the degrading associations of Attic womanhood. 
Aristotle believed that women differed from men in- 
tellectually not only in degree but also in kind, and did 
not “ contemplate their ever attaining more than the 
place of free but inferior and subject personages in the 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 249 

household.” * It is not surprising that comedy turned 
away from individuals of such limited freedom to another 
class of Attic women whose intellectual culture was 
purchased at the expense of their morals — the hetaerae , 
or courtesans. Among the characteristics of the New 
Comedy Mr. Mahaffy places “ the increased prominence 
of courtesan life ; ” and among the stock characters the 
designing courtesan now occupies the foremost place. 
As an evidence of this prominence, it may be observed 
that out of some forty female characters in the extant 
plays of Plautus (whose drama is a close imitation of 
the New Comedy) about one-half are courtesans or 
lenae , or their maids; while the Captivi, notable as the 
most moral play of Plautus, “ ad pudicos mores facta,” 
contains no female characters at all — a fact which would 
seem to imply that their presence was incompatible with 
a drama “ ubi boni meliores fiant,” the quality claimed 
for the Captivi by its Caterva . 

§ 64. The main materials of this later Athenian 
comedy were supplied by domestic life, though philoso- 
phers of the day, such as Epicurus and Zeno, or even 
occasionally political personages, even Alexander himself, 
might be attacked. In truth, the individualism of Attic 
life could not have tolerated any drama but that of trivial 
personalities. Whether we accept the extant Characters 
of Theophrastus as really his or not, w r e have abundant 
evidences in the ethical and political theories of Plato 
and Aristotle to show that analysis of individual 
character had become from the conditions of Attic 
society a common subject of Attic thought. It was 
individualism, though in the very different social life 
of Elizabethan England, that produced such works as 

* Mahaffy, Hist. Class. Gk. Lit., vol. ii. p. 415. See Aristotle, Nat. 
Hist., bk. ix. cli. 1. 


250 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Earle’s Mic rocosm ography * and Overbury ’s Characters . 
It was individualism within the circle of the “ Grand 
Monarch’s ” court that produced at once the Caracteres 
of La Bruyere and the comedies of Moliere. 

Bringing out his first comedy in the very year of 
Demosthenes’ death (322 B.c.), Menander, the model of 
Terence, is a literary man who may be said to occupy 
the unique position of a link at once between Athens 
and Alexandria, and between Athens and Borne. The 
drama, like the written dialogue of criticism and the 
written speech, had now become an instrument of the 
literary artist rather than a public voice addressing 
itself to the people ; and the enormous number of 
comedies attributed to the later comedians, contrasted 
with the small number of their victories, has been 
regarded as an evidence of their plays having been 
intended to be read, and fulfilling to some extent the 
functions of the critical press in our days. Thus the 
severance of literature from practical life — a severance 
in which some modern critics have discovered a kind 
of literary Arcadia — was everywhere accompanying the 
decadence of the creative spirit. We need not here 


* “ Microcosmograpliie, or a peece of the world discovered ; in essays 
and characters. London. Printed by William Stansby for Edward 
Blount, 1628.” In the introduction to Mr. Arber’s reprint of this book, 
it is observed that “ in these earlier days of Puritanism especially, and 
generally throughout the seventeenth century, there was a strong passion 
for analysis of human character. Men delighted in introspection. Essays 
and characters took the place of the romances of the former century. 
Dr. Bliss, to an edition of Microcosmograpliie in 1811, added a list of 
fifty-seven books of characters, all, with one exception, published between 
1605 and 1700. Forty-four years later, writing in 1855 to Notes and Queries , 
ho stated that this list in his own interleaved copy had increased four- 
fold.” So popular was Microcosmograpliie that five editions appear to have 
been published in the first two years of publication. It is worth adding 
that the character of the “ upstart country knight ” (like that of Sir Giles 
Overreach in Massinger’s play) marks the changes in landownership which 
the prosperity of the commercial classes was bringing about. In other 
characters of Earle we may similarly discern the social conditions of his day. 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 251 


pause to inquire how far the plays of Menander were 
intended for reading rather than acting ; we only notice 
the prominence of the former purpose as a point of 
similarity between the drama of cosmopolitan Athens 
and that of Indian world-literature. The play had, in 
fact, come to address itself to a cultured class who could 
take as much pleasure in turning over its pages with 
critical acumen as in witnessing its action on the stage. 
There are certain other respects in which the drama of 
Menander recalls the Indian, and indeed the Chinese, 
theatre. The introduction of philosophic speculation 
could be easily illustrated by parallels from Indian and 
Chinese plays. The following fragment of Menander 
will serve as an example of its introduction : — 

“ O Phania, roethought that wealthy men, 

Who need not borrow, never groan at night. 

Nor, tossing to and fro, cry out ‘ alas,’ 

But deeply sleep a sweet and gentle sleep 
While some sad pauper makes his bitter cry ; 

But no ; I see the men called ‘ blessed with wealth ’ 

Distressed like any of us ; is there then 
Some bond of kinship between life and pain — 

Pain that accompanies the life of wealth, 

Stands close beside the life of reputation, 

And with the life of poverty grows old ? ” * 

How far the comedy of Menander resembled the 
Indian drama in its picturesque descriptions of natural 
scenery, we have not now the means of discovering ; but 
another fragment given by Meineke t would at least 
suggest that the ephemeral span of individual existence 
beside the comparatively eternal life of Nature was 
forcing itself on the Greek mind with something of that 
deep pathos which only the poets of modern Europe have 
profoundly expressed. The fragment runs thus : — 

‘‘This man I call the happiest of men 

• Who, having seen without a touch of pain 

* For Greek, see Meineke, vol. iv. p. 149. t p. 211. 

12 


252 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


The show of all these splendid things — the sun, 

Common to all the world, stars, water, clouds. 

Fire— then returns to whence he came, my friend ; 

For, though a man should live a few sad years, 

Yet shall lie ever see this show pass by, 

And, though he were to live a century. 

No grander sight than this he e’er shall see.” 

§ 65. When the muse of Menander was thus uttering 
the last notes of that dramatic song which had risen 
from Athens at the birth of her literature, the separation 
of philosophy and science from the spirit of literary 
creation had been established. Science, which, save in 
its infancy, refuses to be the citizen of any peculiar State 
and rapidly grows into the cosmopolitan questioner of 
Nature and Humanity, had thrown off the pleasing form 
of Athenian conversation, so brilliantly assumed by the 
world-wide thought of Plato, and in Aristotle had settled 
down into a dry-as-dust collector of facts. Two circum- 
stances would seem to prove that Aristotle himself realised 
with peculiar distinctness this separation of science from 
literature. The first of these is his intentional alteration 
of his own style from a graceful imitation of the Platonic 
to that crabbed but closely accurate use of words with 
which every student of his extant works is familiar. Not 
only do Cicero, Quintilian, and others speak of Aristotle 
as a master of style, but it is a well-ascertained fact that 
in his early writings he essayed to imitate the form of 
Plato’s dialogues ; and, though Aristotle’s dialogues may 
not have been so dramatic as those of Plato, he certainly 
produced three of these compositions (wpi ^tXoao^mc, 
7rfpi rayaOov, and E vSrjjULog) closely after the Platonic 
model. This transition from the diction of a stylist to 
the harsh and often obscure brevity which has been 
likened to a table of contents, a transition which has 
been aptly compared to “ passing from a sunlit garden, 
gay with flowers, to a dark and chilly reading-room,” may 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 253 

be taken as one mark of the Aristotelian separation of 
critical from creative faculties, of science from literature, 
of reasoning analysis from imagination. 

Another mark of the same process is to be found in 
the library associations which Aristotle’s works contain. 
In his youth Aristotle had been a collector of books ; 
while residing at Athens as a pupil of Plato his house 
had been designated the “house of the reader” (oT<co^ 
avayvcocTTov), and the sum of £200,000, given him by 
Alexander mainly with a view to collections for his 
natural history, probably contributed to swell his private 
library. The days of public libraries, too, and laborious 
study of the past had now arrived. Aristotle died in 
323 B.C., shortly before the death of Demosthenes, and 
a few years afterwards, at the suggestion of Demetrius 
Phalereus, last of Attic orators, Ptolemy Soter founded 
the celebrated library of Alexandria, the city in which 
the cosmopolitan Greek spirit was henceforward to find a 
more congenial home than in any of the old city com- 
monwealths. From a Latin scholium on Plautus (dis- 
covered by Professor Osann in 1830) we learn that this 
library (partly kept in the temple of Serapis, partly in 
the Brucheium adjoining the palace) contained “ in the 
Brucheium 400,000 rolls of duplicates and unsorted 
books, and 90,000 separate works properly arranged, and 
in the Serapeum 42,800 volumes, probably the ultimate 
selection or most valuable books in the whole collection.” 
Here was a reservoir for literature ; and, if literature were 
really of artificial making and not the outflow of social 
life, this famous Alexandrian library should have made 
up for the stagnant shallows into which the living streams 
of old Greek society had now spread out. But though 
a library may produce excellent grammarians, critics, 
scientists, it can do little for literature as distinct from 


254 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


science and criticism. It cannot make imagination 
live or change the dry skeletons of analysis into creatures 
of flesh and blood. Hence in Alexandrian erudition 
formal prose occupies the foremost place, critics like 
Zenodotus, men of science like Euclid and Archimedes, 
and chroniclers like Manetho and Berosus, finding it their 
proper instrument. Didactic “ poetry,” like the astro- 
nomical “ epic ” of Aratus, called Prognostics of the 
Weather (Diosemeia), and the so-called “ epics ” of 
Nicander on venomous bites and on antidotes to poison, 
are not sufficiently removed from science to be called 
“ literature,” and as examples of imagination in the 
service of science rank much below Darwin’s Loves of the 
Plants. If Alexandria could offer us nothing better than 
such productions we might pass by the great library, 
contented to note that literature had become so much a 
thing of the past, so little a reflection of living mind, that 
even Theocritus is believed to have made one of those 
tricks with written words which mark a time when 
literature has become a formal toy rather than a spiritual 
reality. The Syrinx , a little poem in twenty verses 
attributed to Theocritus, is so arranged that lines, 
complete and incomplete, succeed one another in couplets, 
“ passing from the hexameter down to the dimeter dactylic 
metre, so as to represent the successive lengths of the 
reeds in a Pandean pipe.” When we remember how 
such “ half-mechanical conceits ” (as Sir J. F. Davis calls 
them), consisting in the fantastic imitation of such objects 
as a knot, a sceptre, a circle, have been well known to the 
Chinese and Arabs, we may find in this Syrinx and in the 
practice of Simmias of Iihodes (who wrote verses “in 
the shapes of an egg, an altar, a double-edged axe, a pair 
of wings ”) evidences of the Oriental torpor which had 
fallen upon Greek poetry at Alexandria. 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 255 


§ 66. Yet the name of Theocritus reminds us that in 
the midst of this decay a new kind of genuine poetry 
blossomed forth. The ephemeral life of individual men, 
contrasted with the apparent eternity of Nature, had pro- 
foundly affected Menander ; and the contrast was now to 
be expressed in those “ little pictures ” of Theocritus, in 
which the shepherds in the front stand out against beau- 
tiful backgrounds of Nature’s own creation. It was not, 
indeed, the first time that the sentiment of Nature had 
found a Greek voice. In the great epics, dating from a 
time when city life had not yet absorbed all the social 
interests of Hellas, we may readily cull out evidences of 
this sentiment. Thus in the Iliad * we have the simile — 

“ As when at night shine out in the sky by the moon in her glory 
Bright stars, when not a breeze is stirring the calm of the heavens ; 
Watch-posts stand out clear, high headlands, and in the distance 
Open glades, and the open of sky looks a break in the heavens ; 

And as he watches the host of the stars the shepherd rejoices 

or, in the Odyssey , f the famous description of the great 
boar’s lair — 

“ Here was the lair of the great boar deep in the heart of the thicket, 
Here where the raging rains of the storm-clouds never had entered, 
Here where the blaze of the noonday sun shot never a sunbeam, 

Here where the piled-up leaves lay dark in the heart of the thicket.” 

Every reader of the Greek epics can recall similar pas- 
sages — the description of Calypso’s cave or that of 
the garden of Alkinous ; and the Works and Days of 
Hesiod contain a picture of winter truly ancient and 
graphic. Moreover, in certain lyrics of early Greece a 
deep feeling for Nature had not been wanting. Thus 
Aleman’s description of night, it has been said, is “more 
like the picture we should expect from Apollonius 
Rhodius or Vergil than from an early Greek poet ” — 

“ Now sleep the mountain- peaks and vales. 

Headlands and torrent-beds, 


* Iliad , via. 555-559. 


t Odyss ., xix. 439-413. 


256 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


The leafy trees and the creeping things the black earth nourishes ; 

The wild beasts on the mountains, and all the swarms of bees, 

And the snakes in the deeps of the purple sea 
Are sleeping ; 

And all the tribes of wide-winged birds 
Are sleeping.” 

Again, while philosophers like Empedocles turned from 
the perpetual jar of human conflicts to physical Nature, 
poets like the Ionic Mimnermus were beginning to sing 
in a strain which anticipates the tones of Menander — his 
confession of human sorrow, his pessimism, as we call it in 
these Schopenhauer days, and his contrast of man’s ephe- 
meral life with the ever-renewing powers of Nature. His 
pessimism Mimnermus expresses thus : — 

“ We, as the leaves which the season of spring full-budding begetteth, 
When the warm ray of the sun gloweth to glory again, 

Only a span-length time by blossoms of youth are delighted. 

Knowing nor evil nor good sent by a being divine. 

For in the garments of mourning the Fates stand ever beside us, 

One with the sorrows of age, one with the sorrows of death, 
Therefore the fruitage of youth grows short-lived in their presence, 
And as a gleam of the sun so is it scattered and gone.” 

But the sentiment of Nature in Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, 
is something deeper than we can find in any of the early 
epic or lyric poets. Cosmopolitan Greece had now expe- 
rienced the littleness of individualised life to a degree 
which neither rhapsodists nor lyric poets could have con- 
ceived. Men had broken loose from their old clan groups 
only to isolate themselves in turn from the State ; and if 
the individual had thus become “ free,” it was at the 
expense of that greatness which, as a member of such 
corporate bodies, he once possessed. Therefore more than 
in the days of kingly heroism, more than in the days of 
city patriotism, men turned to Nature as symbolising 
that permanence wdiich looks divine. To the glades, the 
springs, and the rivers Moschus turns for a voice of 
lamentation over Bion — to the trees of the forest and the 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 257 


flowers rather than to men and women, who have become 
too selfish to lament much over any of their short-lived 
fellows. The sad contrast of man’s being with the life of 
Nature, the contrast of Homer, Simonides, Mimnermus, is 
thus repeated by Moschus : — 

“ Raise, ye muses of Sicily, raise ye the wail of the mourner ! 

Ah ! when the mallows have withered, have withered away in the 
garden, 

Or the green parsley dies, or dies the soft bloom of anethum, 

Yet will they rise in life and spring for the season returning ; 

But we, the great and the wise and the strong among men, when we 
perish, 

Silently sleep in the earth the sleep that knows no waking.” 

§ 67. Theocritus is the true spokesman of this new 
sentiment. Like other Alexandrian poets (Philetas of 
Cos, Callimachus of Cyrene, who has been called “the type 
of an Alexandrian man of letters,” Lycophron of Chalkis), 
Theocritus was not an Alexandrian, but either, as seems 
most probable, a native of Syracuse, or of Cos. His use 
of Sicilian Doric and the Sicilian tone of his poems 
would seem to confirm the general opinion that he was a 
Syracusan. In any case bucolic or pastoral poetry finds 
its home in Sicily ; and, when we remember the slave- 
gangs of Italy and the vast estates ( latifundia ) which 
ruined her free yeomanry, we shall see that the home of 
bucolic poetry is not so secondary a matter as might at 
first appear. There can be little doubt that the rise of a 
true poetry of Nature, besides being checked by the 
municipal organisations of Greece and Italy, was partly 
prevented by the ugly associations of slavery with country 
life. Just as the presence of serfdom in medieval Europe 
would appear to have diverted the feudal singers from 
Nature herself to Nature seen through the medium of the 
seigneur’s life of war and the chase, so the singers of 
Greece and Italy could not take that intense interest in 
Nature which largely arises from the personal freedom of 


258 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


man in her presence. To discuss the influences of different 
forms of landownership on the sentiment of Nature would 
carry ns too far afield ; yet, if the village community of 
India is to he largely credited with the Indian love of 
Nature, the very different system of the Roman latif undid 
may be credited with an opposite effect. If* Sicily, then, 
was the real home of bucolic poetry, we may feel assured 
that there was some special reason for the fact ; that the 
relations of man with Nature were here less repulsive 
from servile associations than elsewhere ; that his freedom 
and happiness were not so far removed from those of the 
bucolic Daphnis or Damoetas as to make the idyll a 
grotesque falsehood. No such idylls would ever have 
been suggested by the associations of an American slave- 
worked plantation any more than by those of a Roman 
ergastulum ; and if, among all the slave-owning countries 
of the Alexandrian age, Sicily was the home of the idyll, 
we cannot help believing that, while the new poetry of 
Nature marks a general desire to look for poetic inspi- 
ration elsewhere than in the littleness of human indi- 
vidualism, it also indicates special conditions of social life 
in the country of the idyll. 

It is the union of vivid natural descriptions with 
graphic pictures of simple human life and character that 
has made Theocritus the favourite of so many and 
diverse literary epochs. To sympathise truly with the 
dramas of Sophocles or Aristophanes, we must be largely 
acquainted with the contemporary spirit of social life at 
Athens, or even with minute points in Athenian politics. 
To sympathise with the odes of Pindar we must possess 
some of a Dissen’s learning as well as a musical imagi- 
nation which no learning can create. But the idylls of 
Theocritus present man and Nature in such simplicity 
that we take in all at a glance. Take, for instance, part 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 259 


of the twenty-first idyll as a picture in which the human 
interest predominates ; and, though the idyll opens with 
the heartless sophism of wealth — • 

“ Want, Diophantus, alone stirs men to the arts of invention ” * — 
the description of the “ two ancient fishers ” could 
not have been written by a man whose sympathies were 
bounded by the courtly life of Alexandria. Mr. Calverley 
here saves me the trouble of translating ; his scholarly 
translation runs thus : — 

<{ Two ancient fishers once lay side by side 
On piled-up sea-wrack in their wattled hut, 

Its leafy wall their curtain. Near them lay 
The weapons of their trade, basket and rod, 

Hooks, weed -encumbered nets, and cords and oars, 

And, propped on rollers, an infirm old boat. 

Their pillow was a scanty mat, eked out 
With caps and garments. . . . 

Their craft their all ; their mistress, Poverty; 

Their only neighbour Ocean, who for aye 
Round their lone hut came floating lazily.” 

Elsewhere the framework of natural scenery attains to 
greater prominence, as in the following description at the 
end of the seventh idyll. 

“ There we lay 

Half-buried in a couch of fragrant reed 
And fresh-cut vine-leaves— who so glad as we? 

A wealth of elm and poplar shook o’erhead ; 

Hard by a sacred spring flowed gurgling on 
From the nymphs’ grot, and in the sombre boughs 
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously ; 

Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away 

The tree-frog’s note was heard ; the crested lark 

Sang with the goldfinch ; turtles made their moan, 

And o’er the fountain hung the gilded bee. 

All of rich summer smelt, of autumn all ; 

Pears at our feet, and apples at our side 
Tumbled luxuriant; branches on the ground 
Sprawled, overweighed with damsons ; while we brushed 
From the cask’s head the crust of four long years.” 

Theocritus has combined dramatic pictures of human 
life and character with graphic description of Nature ; but 

* a irevia, Ai'cpavre, fioya Tas Tex vas tytlpsi- 


260 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


let it not be forgotten that the latter is only description, 
not what Mr. Matthew Arnold has appropriately termed 
interpretation. Theocritus cannot see, makes no effort 
to see, Nature as distinct from human associations. He 
cannot, like Keats and Guerin, speak of the physical 
world “like Adam naming by divine inspiration the 
creatures.” His expressions do not altogether “corre- 
spond with the things’ essential reality.” Nature for 
him is beautiful not because she is Nature, but because 
Lycidas, “ the favourite of the Muse,” with shaggy goat- 
hide slung across his shoulder, broad belt clasping his 
patched cloak, and gnarled olive branch in his right 
hand, watches “the lizard sleeping on the wall,” or “the 
crested lark fold his wandering wing.” Nature is boun- 
tiful for Theocritus because some human singer hears 
“ the bees that make a music round the hive,” and when 
this singer dies all Nature may “ go wrong ” — 

“From thicket, now, and thorn let violets spring; 

Now let white lilies drape the juniper, 

And pines grow figs; and Nature all go wrong; 

For Laplmis dies.” 

§ 68. In Roman imitations of this Alexandrian poet 
Nature likewise owes her beauty to human associations. 
A Roman Haphnis sits beneath the “whispering oak” of 
Vergil ; the Mincius has his “green banks wreathed with 
tender reeds,” the “ swarms of bees are humming from 
the sacred oak,” and Corydon sings the delights of the 
summer scene ; but it is the presence of man that the 
heart of the poet loves, it is humanised Nature he really 
celebrates. Between the Alexandrian and the Roman 
poetry of the empire there are, indeed, many bonds of 
kinship. Social conditions at the Alexandria of the 
Ptolemies and the Rome of Augustus were not widely 
dissimilar. In both courtly adulation had taken, or was 


TIIE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 261 

taking, the place of old political freedom. In both the 
elegant imitation of models was choking any inspiration 
of genuine poetry. In Hboth literature had become the 
peculiar possession of the few. In both individualism 
was well pleased to offer the incense of its learned refine- 
ment to any human god who was strong enough to embody 
the force of government and propitious to grant official 
reward. Perhaps there was no domain of poetry in which 
the Romans could breathe a little freely from the mastering 
spirit of Greek song save one — that of natural poetry; 
but the Eclogues of Vergil show us that no such freedom 
was to be attempted. Abounding in imitations of* Theo- 
critus — for out of the 840 lines of which they are made 
up we may reckon at least 150, or about one-fifth, as 
imitations of Theocritus more or less distinct — the 
Eclogues illustrate a fact in the imitation literature of 
Rome which is singularly significant and often singularly 
overlooked. This is the fact that Roman litterateurs 
sought their models less in the splendid masterpieces of 
the free Athenian commonwealth than in the cosmo- 
politan writings of Athenian decay and Alexandrian 
pedantry. If the models of Plautus and Terence were 
found in Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and the “New 
Comedy” in general, Vergil is deeply indebted — more 
deeply than most scholars suppose — to the Argonauts of 
Apollonius Rhodius, the pupil of Callimachus. Aratus, 
the poetic scientist of Alexandria who threw the astro- 
nomy of Eudoxus into hexameter verse, was the model of 
Cicero’s and Domitian’s poetic attempts. In Callimachus 
and Philetas Propertius found his models ; and the Coma 
Berenices of Catullus is a close translation of the courtly 
flattery in which Callimachus delighted. It was in imi- 
tation of Callimachus, too, that Ovid wrote his Ibis. In 
a word, Roman poetry owes so deep a debt to Alexandria 


262 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


that without her Rome might never have possessed a 
Catullus, an Ovid, a Vergil. Where shall we find the 
cause of this indebtedness ? In similarity of social 
conditions, in the great truth that literature, even in 
its imitative work, depends on contemporary life and 
thought ; that no number of exquisite models can make 
up for deficiencies in these living sources of inspiration. 
If it were otherwise, not only would the making of 
literatures be matter of chance or personal caprice, 
but the scientific study of literature would almost be an 
absurdity. 

The main characteristics of Roman, as of Alexandrian, 
world-literature are its individualism and the colossal 
personality of the emperor, who, in an age when force 
alone held the community together, absorbed as the 
world-god all the divinity Roman courtiers could feel. 
In the satirists of Rome we have the spirit of this indi- 
vidualism crying aloud, a spirit which only takes perma- 
nent possession of a community when a profound belief 
in human selfishness has become the terrible substitute 
for a creed. “ Satira tota nostra est,” says Quintilian ; 
and, though the satiric spirit was by no means absent 
from Athens, we must allow that, in spite of the moral 
purposes to which Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal 
applied it, only the Rome of the empire could have pro- 
duced such witnesses to social disintegration as the works 
of the last three writers. It was an error, common until 
Mommsen (erring, perhaps, in the opposite direction) had 
exposed the sham of later Roman Republicanism, to sup- 
pose that this disintegration was due to the decay of old 
Roman life alone. It was to a large extent the result 
of an organised religious, political, and moral hypocrisy 
which the coexistence of aristocratic rule with mock 
democracy rendered unavoidable. In a community based 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 263 

on slave-labour it was really impossible that the demo- 
cratic sentiment of equality could count for much. The 
Eoman citizen had only to walk out into streets thronged 
with slaves in order to realise the truth that plebeian 
citizenship was, after all, only an aristocracy with a larger 
radius than the old circle of patrician kinship. To the 
other ruinous results of Roman slavery — decline of pro- 
duction and population, discredit of manual labour, dis- 
couragement of legitimate marriage, and the like — must 
be added the constant evidence it afforded that high-flown 
language of social reformers, as in appeals to the “ Law of 
Nature,” were but expressions of an organised hypocrisy. 
When it is also remembered that old Roman religion 
long before the time of the emperors had become such a 
farce that Cicero wondered how two augurs could meet 
without bursting into laughter in one another’s face, it 
need not surprise us that Roman literature produced its 
most original works in satires which exposed the political, 
religious, and moral hypocrisy upon which the decaying 
republic as well as the empire depended for social sta- 
bility. In such works the rage of an Archilochus or the 
misanthropy of a Swift can do great things, because they 
are built out of unsocial antipathies, personal piques, and 
all that little meanness which is fatal to the truly con- 
structive imagination nothing but wide and deep social 
sympathies can create. 

§ 69. But over and above this individualism, which 
must have sadly chilled any original imagination of the 
Roman poets, there was another cause which, from the 
rise of the empire, turned the makers of Roman literature 
to cosmopolitan and courtly Alexandria for guidance. 
This was the centralisation of all power in the person of 
the emperor. The adulation of Callimachus, who found 
among the stars the stolen tresses of Berenice, was now to 


264 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


be outdone. In his first Eclogue Yergil does not shrink 
from calling Augustus his god — 

“ For lie shall be to me ever a god, and his altar be reddened 
Oft with the blood of the tenderest lamb to be found in the sheepfolds.”* 

So Horace addresses Augustus as a god to whom altars 
are being .raised — 

“ Prsesenti tibi maturos largimur honores, 

Jurandasque tuum per nomen ponimus aras, 

Nil oriturum alias, nil ortum tale fatentes.” 

And gradually this worship of the emperor became not 
merely a piece of courtly flattery or vulgar servility, but 
the last substitute for a common creed between Romans 
of wealth and birth, the proletariate, and the provincials. 

If we wish to observe the influence of this divine 
imperial personage on literature, we cannot do better than 
turn to the pages of the Roman Thucydides — Tacitus, 
the man of all others opposed to the new divinity. The 
cessation of the Gomitia, the conversion of the Senate into 
a mere registering machine for imperial decrees, the 
dependence of the law-courts on the emperor’s despotism, 
had now checked any farther development of Latin prose 
— if, indeed, under any circumstances it could have been 
carried higher than the point in which the eloquence 
of Cicero had culminated. Moreover, the extension of 
Latin, for administrative purposes, over a vast extent of 
conquered territory was beginning to affect Roman litera- 
ture much as a similar cause some centuries later produced 
the mixture of pure Arabic with Persian and other lan- 
guages of peoples subjugated to Islam. As yet, how- 
ever, prose, the proper medium of Roman literature (for, 
except the rude Saturnian, Roman metres were only Greek 
exotics), showed little sign of decay. It is not any weak- 

* “ Namque erit ille raihi semper deus ; illius aram 
Ssepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus.” 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 265 

ness in his prose, certainly as vigorous and graphic as 
Rome had yet known, that makes Tacitus an exponent of 
imperial times. It is the fact that, in spite of his .Repub- 
lican Conservatism, he is forced to make the Imperator 
the central figure in his Histories and Annals. While his 
dominant idea, like that of Lucan, is a mistaken belief 
in the old Roman oligarchy which had been a manifest 
failure a hundred years before the battle of Actium, it is 
the personal character of the Caesar that not only gives 
their unity to his historic writings, but supplies a false 
explanation of Roman decline as clue to the depravity 
of the emperors. Extreme individualism had, in fact, 
reached such a height in Rome that even the historic 
theorist could only picture the unity of the Roman world 
in the person of the emperor, and insensibly transferred 
to it all the dark traits of the selfish units into which 
Roman society had been broken up. Closely connected 
with this effect of individualism is another literary charac- 
teristic which Tacitus shares with all Roman historians — 
preference for biography over any description or expla- 
nation of social life. So Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha, 
and Suetonius’ lives of the Caesars, remind us how an 
aristocratic and courtly society, in many respects resem- 
bling that of Paris a century ago, showed the aptitude for 
memoir-writing which long characterised the literature 
of France. Another mark of the individualising spirit 
shared by Tacitus with such writers as Saint Simon and 
He Retz is the satirical tone often heard in the Histories 
and the Annals, but perhaps most distinctly in the 
Germany — a work which even loses some of its antiqua- 
rian credit from its clear intention to contrast the vices of 
civilisation with the virtues of barbarians. 

But, besides these marks of Roman decadence, the 
prose of Tacitus contains an element which is at once the 


266 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


secret of its strength and an evidence of literary decay. 
The condensed brevity with which he writes is not, like the 
brevity of Thucydides, a mark of undeveloped prose, not, 
like that of Aristotle, an effort to be scientifically accurate 
in the use of words, but rather like the epigram itself the 
outcome of an age which thinks it knows all that men 
can know, and seeks to make up for the triteness of its 
ideas by packing them in small bundles, weighty yet 
portable, and in themselves complete. It is possible for 
communities, no less than individuals, to exhaust their old 
stock of ideas without acquiring new ; and such an age of 
exhaustion, reduced to the elegant or brief expression of 
small witticisms, is marked by the epigrams of Martial, 
the contemporary of Tacitus. 

§ 70. Beyond Martial (who died between 102 and 
104 a.d.) we need not pass. The world-literature of 
Rome, which had from the first been an imitative toy 
made and intended to be appreciated by a narrowly 
exclusive class of cultured men, never heartily sought the 
only fountains of true literary inspiration — popular life 
and the life of nature. There was now not much to inspire 
song in the life of Rome — that cascade of contempt 
which we may conceive as perpetually falling from the 
wealthy patrician to the poor patrician, from the poor 
patrician to the plebeian, from the plebeian to the pro- 
vincial, and from all these to the slaves. Such was the 
miserable state of social life which drew forth from Pliny 
the remark that “ there is nothing more proud or more 
paltry than man.” A society of such limited sympathies 
and unlimited selfishness was unsuited to the production 
of song, save such as “the flock of mockbirds ” (as Apol- 
lonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, 
Claudian, are termed by Shelley) could produce by imita- 
tion. Perhaps the making of oratorical prose (which, by 


THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 267 


the way, was largely due to contact with popular life) was 
the true mission of that language which, as Heine says, 
" is the language of command for generals, of decree for 
administrators, an attorney language for usurers, a lapi- 
dary language for the stone-hard people of Home ” — “ the 
appropriate language of materialism ” which Christianity 
has " tormented itself for a thousand years in the vain 
attempt to spiritualise.” Not even in Nature herself 
had the cultured Romans a refuge from the paralysing 
spectacle of Homan society. It is true that the Homan 
poets occasionally give us descriptions of Nature. Such, 
for example, is Vergil’s picture of the gathering and 
bursting tempest in the first book of the Georgies ; such 
is Ovid’s description of the fountain on Mount Hymettus, 
or Lucan’s sketch of the ruined Druidic forest in the 
third book of the Pharsalia. But the gloomy spectacle of 
slavery would seem to have checked the development of a 
truly imaginative Nature-poetry, and to have thrown back 
Roman genius on those scenes of social life in which the 
unsympathetic characters of Roman citizens were enougli 
to freeze the most vigorous imagination.* 

Thus did the broken bonds of social sympathy, a 
disruption terribly confessed in Diocletian’s famous edict 
on prices, and inevitably avenged by the disappearance of 
the Roman empire before barbarians who reintroduced 
the devotion of man to man, react upon the sentiment of 
Nature. If, as Professor Blackie has said so truly, the 

* It is worth observing that the landscape painting of Rome (so far as 
may be judged from excavations at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia) 
would seem to have consisted of pictures which “ were often mere bird’s- 
eye views, resembling maps, and aimed rather at the representation of 
seaport towns, villas, and artificial gardens, than of Nature in her freedom. 
That which the Greeks and the Romans regarded as attractive in a land- 
scape seems to have been almost exclusively the agreeably habitable, and 
not what we call the wild and romantic.” — Humboldt, Kosmos , vol. ii. 
p. 77 (Colonel Sabine’s translation). Cf. Ruskin, Mod. Fainlcrs , vol. iii., 
on the “ subservience of classical landscape to human comfort.” 


268 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


writing and appreciation of poetry depend on kindly and 
genial sensibility, if imagination itself depends on the 
existence of some genuine sense of human brotherhood, 
be it wide as the world or narrow as the clan, we must 
admit that the social life of Imperial Koine was such as 
must destroy any literature. The Stoic maxim, “ to 
watch the world and imitate it,” may seem to us a fine 
thought finely expressed ; but the world of the Koman 
had become a microcosm too small and selfish to suggest 
anything of that universe by participation in which we 
rise out of our individual littleness. The philosophy of 
self-culture could do little but aggravate the miseries of 
such an age. No renovation of a perishing society was 
to be expected from that isolating individual culture 
which had breathed its poison into Koman literature in 
its Greek fosterage, and now 

** Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round 
With blackness as a solid wall. 

Far off she seemed to hear the dully sound 
Of human footsteps fall.” 


CHAPTER III. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 

§ 71. The story of a literature’s decline and fall, as ex- 
emplified by Alexandrian and Roman cosmopolitanism, is 
curiously like and unlike that of Israel’s decadence. 
Hebrews, like Athenians, before the destruction of their 
political independence had lost much of their old 
communal sympathies. Perhaps no better exemplifica- 
tion of the principle that the movement of progressive 
societies is from communal to individual life can be 
found all the v/orld over than the contrast between the 
inherited guilt of the Decalogue and the strenuous 
assertion of personal responsibility by Ezekiel. “Behold,” 
says the nabi, “ all souls are to me thus — as a soul the 
father and as a soul the son ; thus are they to me ; the 
sinning soul, it shall die. . . . The sinning soul, it shall 
die; son shall not bear the father’s sin, nor father bear the 
son’s sin ; the righteousness of the righteous shall be on 
himself, and the iniquity of the iniquitous shall be on 
himself.” * Between the period at which the Hebrew 
castes of priests had collected the customs of the allied 
tribes and the age of Ezekiel w r e may thus infer that a 
great social change had taken place. Clan life among 
the priestly and landowning aristocracy of Israel, as 
* Ezek. xviii. 4, 5, 20 


270 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


afterwards in the town life of Athens and Rome, had 
been broken up and the spirit of self-interest and personal 
responsibility had been developed. No doubt the Hebrew 
village communities still remained as the social organisa- 
tion of the * am-haaretz , or “ common folk of the land.” 
But, just as the village communities in India became 
subordinated to the Brahmans, so the Hebrew clausmen 
seem to have sunk perhaps even into serfdom under the 
rule of their priests and nobles. 

But, though communal ideas might have lost something 
of prestige by thus becoming the peculiar property of 
impoverished if not degraded freemen, they remained the 
great ideals of Hebrew thought ; and side by side with 
Ezekiel’s priestly and aristocratic individualism we have 
clear signs of this old Hebrew social spirit. If in his 
utterances personal responsibility is, as we have seen, 
stated with startling distinctness such as no earlier nabi 
approximates, in none also can we find the same social 
conception of national unity under the figure of an ideal 
clan communion. As in days of Spartan decline the 
idea of a fresh distribution of lands became a kind of 
echo from old Doric communal life, so does the mind of 
Ezekiel recur to the primitive allotments and village 
communes of early Hebrew life. Even in this return, 
however, there is a mark of the cosmopolitan spirit which 
the associations of Babylon were stirring in the Hebrew 
soul ; the “ stranger ” is also to have his lot among the 
clansmen of the chosen people. “So you shall divide 
this land into lots for you, for the tribes of Yisrael ; and 
it shall be that you shall allot it by portion to yourselves 
and to the resident strangers (gerim) among you, who 
have begotten children among you, and they shall be for 
you as native among the sons of Yisrael. . . . And it shall 
be that in the tribe where the stranger resides you 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 271 


shall assign his portion.” f Thus are the cosmopolitan 
and personal spirits found in company among the 
Hebrews, as among the Greeks and Homans, and the 
twofold process of social expansion and individual 
emancipation from clan restraints again meets us. 

It is this union of the individual with the social 
spirit which makes Ezekiel perhaps the most interesting 
figure in Hebrew literature. In him we have a link 
between the oldest forms of Hebrew life and that spirit of 
Greek philosophy which the conquests of Alexander and 
his successors were to introduce into Israel. In him we 
have a thinker and poet and priest who explains at once 
the narrowness and the breadth of which the Hebrew 
mind has proved itself capable. From him, as in two 
streams, we may watch the learned individualism which 
was to terminate in Sadducean materialism and the 
puerilities of the Talmud, and the life-giving spirit of 
social sympathy which was to expand into the morality 
of Christ, taking their rise as from a common source. 
But, unlike some of his Greek contemporaries, Ezekiel 
does not appear to be conscious of the grave ethical 
problems raised by individualism. Pindar has learned 
the value of an individual future life of reward or punish- 
ment as the great sanction of personal morality. But 
the shadow-world of Ezekiel is little more than the 
Odyssean Hades. For Ezekiel Slicol is indeed a place 
far wider, far more grandly vague than the subterranean 
home of the clan ; the shadow-world has expanded into 
the gathering-place of whole nations, and the idea of 
Sheol has become world-wide. In Ezekiel’s “land of 
the underparts,” which he contrasts with “ the land of 
life,” are fallen nations “ with their graves all round ” — 
Ashur and his company, Elam and her multitude, Edom, 
t Ezek. xlvii. 21-23. 


272 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


her kings and princes ; and at the sight of the fallen 
mighty, “ who have descended to Hades with their weapons 
of war and laid their swords under their heads,” Pharaoh 
and all his host are comforted.* Throughout this 
remarkable picture there is no glimpse of personal 
punishment or reward in a future state ; it is the picture 
of a shadow-world in which the dead in nations lie 
disfigured shades of their mangled bodies, a pale sub- 
terranean battle-field in which national or group distinc- 
tions are alone noticed. When Yergil in Hades sees 
Deiphobus with mangled body and gashed face, the idea 
is as materialistic as Ezekiel’s ; but Vergil’s Hades is 
peopled with individuals, and contains the Pindaric ideas 
of personal reward and punishment ; it is far removed 
from the clan age and clan associations. Dante’s de- 
scriptions of the City of Dis, where are the tombs of the 
heretics burning with intense fire, has been compared with 
Ezekiel’s picture ; but the sepulchres of Dante are not the 
gathering-places of nations , they are abodes of torture 
for individuals such as Earinata degli Uberti ; indeed, 
Dante’s Hades exactly reflects the strongly individualised 
life of the Italian republics, Florence in particular. In 
Ezekiel the absence of this personal future of reward or 
punishment is all the more remarkable because of his 
open repudiation of the old clan morality. He is, there- 
fore, in the position of a man who has discarded the 
traditional morality without finding any sanction to put 
in its place ; the wicked may now prosper and the righteous 
perish without even the clan justice of inherited evil or 
good. 

§ 72. How this ethical position of Ezekiel was likely 
to lead to pessimism the Book of Qoheleth (or Ecclesiastes, 
as we call it) only too sadly indicates. Individualism in 
* See Ezek. xxxii. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 273 


the age of Simonides and Bacchylides, while belief in 
personal immortality was still an esoteric doctrine, had 
spoken thus : — 

“ For mortal man not to be bom is best 
Nor e’er to see the bright beams of the day; 

Since, as life rolls away, 

No man that breathes was ever alway blest.” 

The mournful voice of the Semitic “ Preacher ” speaks 
in this key, too, because over him, too, there broods an 
age full of individualised feelings, but without that eternal 
conception of human personality which in a manner 
places the individual on a par with the corporate life of 
groups or even humanity itself. Like the sun in his daily 
round, or the wind in his circuits, or the rivers returning 
to the place from whence they came, moves the life of 
man ; and there is no new thing under the sun, for the 
“Preacher,” like the Alexandrian savants , possesses, or 
thinks he possesses, universal knowledge. Before this 
dull round, this fatal law of human cycles, all differences 
between individuals disappear; an impersonal Fate de- 
stroys the distinctions between good and evil bound up so 
indissolubly with personal morality, and even reduces 
man, individual and social, to the level of the brute. 
“ For the fate ( miqreh , lit. ‘ what meets ’) of the sons of 
man and the fate of the beast are one, as the death of the 
one so the death of the other ; for one spirit is to all, and 
the advantage of man over the beast is nothing, for all are 
vanity ; all go to one place, all are of the dust and to the 
dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of the 
sons of man goes upwards, but the spirit of the beast 
descends downwards to the earth? . . . All are alike; 
one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good 
and the pure and the unclean, for him who sacrifices 
and him who sacrifices not ; like good, like sinner. . . . 


274 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


This is the evil in everything done beneath the sun that 
nil have one fate.” * In this life, divorced from all 
moral restraints, is a pessimism which surpasses that ol 
Greek or Roman. The sprightly Greek had reserved 
his melancholy for old age, with its lost vitality and 
outlook on the grave. 

“ But when at length the season of youth has vanished behind us, 
Then to have perished at once truly were better than life,” 

says Simonides; and even the gloomy Tacitus, when, at 
the opening of his Histories, he declared that “ never by 
more ruinous disasters of the Roman people had it been 
proved that the gods care nothing for our safety but only 
for taking vengeance on us,” admitted the existence of 
avenging deities, and shrank from the moral nihilism 
which Qoheleth avows. No wonder the Oriental pes- 
simist finds the life of man altogether insufferable, and 
envies the blessings of the unborn : “ So I praised the 
dead who long since died more than the living who are 
yet alive, but better than either of these I praised him 
who has never been, who has never seen the evil deeds 
which are done beneath the sun.” f 

Qoheleth thus takes us some way on one of the two 
streams which part from Ezekiel downwards — the stream 
of Hebrew melancholy which the unhappy times of An- 
tiochus did so much to increase. The study of early 
Hebrew literature, fostered by the hope of national inde- 
pendence and the gradual alteration of popular speech 
into Aramaic, had produced a literate class which soon 
lost the idea of literary creation in a minute verbal study 
aimed at nothing higher than the interpretation of the 
Torah, or Law. In Ezekiel the Hebrew idea of literature 
had reached its widest circumference; it was then no 
longer circumscribed by the narrow limits of the priestly 
* Ecclee. iii. 19-21 ; ix. 2, 3. f Eccles. iv. 2, 3. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 275 


hymnal, or the legal books, or chronicles of the priestly 
caste ; and the rythmical address of the nabi, primarily 
intended to be heard rather than to be read, had in 
Ezekiel’s hands, as in those of Jeremiah, become an 
instrument for the pen as much as for the voice. A 
critical age,* bookish and surfeited with study, was, how- 
ever, to reduce Hebrew ideas of literature into narrower 
bounds. No doubt the era of Hebrew captivity may be 
credited with an outburst of Hebrew genius ; for new 
ideas were then breaking in upon the old exclusiveness 
of the Hebrew mind. But the Hebrews seem to have 
soon learned that if they intended to maintain any 
national sentiments in spite of their political weakness, 
they must forego cosmopolitan ideas and restrain them- 
selves within national traditions. Thus the literary class, 
which now tended to take the place of an aristocracy, 
was checked in its sympathies. Little remained for the 
patriotic Hebrew but to anticipate the Arab’s deification 
of his Qur’an by setting up the Torah for verbal worship ; 
and the alphabetical psalms and arrangement of Lamen- 
tations t show how the creative imagination of the nabis 
was giving way to literary tricks reminding us of the 

* Dean Stanley ( Tlist . Jewish Church , vol. iii. p. 16) observes that 
while the public life of the people disappeared with the fall of Jerusalem, 
while “ the prophets could no longer stand in the temple courts or on the 
cliffs of Carmel to warn by word of mouth or parabolic gesture, there is 
one common feature which runs through all the writings of this period, 
and which served as a compensation for the loss of the living faces and 
living words of the ancient seers. Now began the practice of committing 
to writing, of compiling, of epistolary correspondence ; ” as Ewald says, 
“ never before had literature possessed so profound a significance for 
Israel.” Thus Jeremiah throws his prophecies into the form of a letfer 
to the exiles, a literary form which has been compared with the Epistles 
of the New Testament ; and the arrangement of Ezekiel’s prophecies in 
chronological order is another sign of critical times. 

f The twenty-two verses of the first, second, and fourth chapters begin 
with each letter of the alphabet in succession, while the sixty-six verses 
of the third chapter are likewise arranged, only repeating the same letter 
at the beginning of three verses successively. 

13 


276 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Alexandrian Syrinx . The name by which Ezra is 
known, “ the scribe ” (hassopher), and the intermixture 
of Aramaic with Hebrew in his language, indicate the age 
of verbal criticism and the redaction of the canon — the 
Alexandrian period of Hebrew literature. 

Still the exiles at Babylon learned to spiritualise 
Hebrew sentiments and to expand their range beyond the 
circle of Hebrew associations — learned, in fact, the two 
great lessons of personal responsibility and universal 
sympathy taught in India about this time by the famous 
Gautama Buddha (543 b.c.). In the Book of Daniel, 
with its international tone and mystic forecast of the 
world’s history, that book which, for its perception of 
successive epochs in human development, has been called 
the first attempt at a philosophy of history, “ the first fore- 
runner of Herder, Lessing, and Hegel,” we have this ex- 
panded Hebraeism displaying itself in literature as late 
as 168-164 b.c. Other influences, however, triumphed, 
and the “ murmurs and scents of the infinite sea,” which 
the night-wind of Babylonian conquest had for a moment 
swept into the narrow channels of Hebrew literature, died 
away on the stagnant shallows of a verbal criticism more 
deadly than those of Alexandria herself. 

§ 73. But Alexandria and Greek intellect were to be 
much more closely connected with the Hebrew spirit 
than by way of parallel decadence; and in this living 
connection we find united those two streams of Hebrew 
feeling we have observed in Ezekiel — the social, typified 
by his national picture of clan life, and the personal, 
marked by his repudiation of communal morality. While 
exiles and returned captives were spiritualising the ritual 
of Israel ; while the worship of the synagogue was growing 
up and prayer taking the place of sacrifice ; while, later 
on, the scribes were by their traditions “making a hedge 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 277 

about the Law ” and gliding into an exclusiveness re- 
calling old Hebrew life, the conquests of Alexander had 
brought Greek language and thought among the Semites. 
Malachi, last of the nabis, describes the state of social 
life in Israel before this new influence reached the 
Hebrews. Priestly traditions have “caused many to 
stumble at the Law ; ” and the declaration of a coming 
judgment on “ false swearers, and those who defraud the 
hireling in wages, the widow, and the fatherless,” * re- 
minds us of that social injustice against which Isaiah and 
Amos had formerly preached. The social spirit of the 
old Hebrew village communities was being again shocked 
by action from individual self-interest without a thought 
of common sympathy. “ Have we not all one Father ? 
Hath not God created us ? Why do we deal treacher- 
ously every man against his brother, profaning the cove- 
nant of our fathers ? ” t But if the old political idea of 
a Hebrew League or Covenant (Berith) thus meets us 
as an ideal of social sympathy, the dominant idea of 
Malachi, that God is “robbed in tithes and offerings,” 
proves that the materialising spirit of Levitical rites 
rather than moral self-culture was at work. 

Perhaps the earliest direct evidences of Greek in- 
fluence in Hebrew literature are to be found in the Greek 
names of the musical instruments mentioned in the Book 
of Daniel. J Classical Hebrew was now dying out, as this 
very book, by its intermixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, 
clearly shows. But, though the social teaching of the 
nabis might thus seem to be perishing among narrow- 
minded descendants who were losing the very power of 
understanding their language, Greek influences were 
destined to produce an expansion of the old Hebrew 
social spirit, and a deepening of the weak Hebrew sense 
* Mai. iii. 5. t Mai. ii. 10. J eft. iii ? 


278 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of personality beyond anything which even an Ezekiel 
might have anticipated. The cosmopolitan spirit aroused 
in Ezekiel by the world-wide associations of Babylon had 
been checked by the necessity of stopping, even at the 
cost of a relapse into narrow Hebroeism, that merger of 
Hebrew in Aramaic language and thought which was 
insidiously progressing. Side by side with the scribes 
learned in the Torah had arisen an inferior class of inter- 
preters, whose business was the rendering of the archaic 
Hebrew into the popular Aramaic. Moreover, something 
worse than Aramaised language was resulting from 
Hebrew contact with their Semite kinsmen ; conceptions 
more or less opposed to monotheism were creeping in 
under cover of reverence for angels. It has been ob- 
served that the Book of Malachi indicates the craving for 
“messengers,” or intermediate spirits, between that Yah- 
veh whose very name had become “ incommunicable ” 
and his people. Psalms written after the return * place 
the “ angels” or “messengers ” of Yahveh at the head of 
the creation. In Ezekiel and Zechariali the innermost 
circle of angels is “ dimly arranged in the mystic number 
of seven.” In the Book of Daniel for the first time we 
have two names of angels, Michael and Gabriel. In the 
Book of Tobit a third, Raphael, is added; Uriel follows 
next; and then, “with doubtful splendour,” as Dean 
Stanley says, Phaniel, Raguel, and the rest. Such were 
the dangers to which Aramaising influences were exposing 
Hebrew language and thought. 

But no such dangers were, at first at least, perceptible 
on the side of Hellenism. Greek language and thought 
might well seem too widely separated from Hebrew to 
allow any popularisation of Hellenic influences. From 
the Greeks, accordingly, philosophic borrowing might 
* Cf. Ps. cxlviii. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 279 

be made without any apparent danger of undermining 
Hebrew unity ; and while there was less fear in this 
respect to be entertained of a people so different from 
themselves, the condition of Hebrew thought supplied 
special reasons for the preference. We have seen how the 
development of individual freedom, unaccompanied by 
ideas of personal immortality, had in Qoheleth terminated 
in one of the most despairful pictures of human origin 
and destiny which the literature of any age has ever pro- 
duced. The vague Aramaic spirit-world of angels was, 
however, preparing the way for Platonic teaching ; and 
when Hellenised Hebrews, acquainted with the ethics of 
Socrates and Plato, began to compare their own Ezekiel 
or Qoheleth with such philosophic inquirers, they must 
have observed that the thinkers who, against the indi- 
vidualism of the sophistic age, had endeavoured to teach 
the doctrines of conscience and personal immortality, had 
been engaged in solving, or attempting to solve, the very 
problems which had perplexed the master-minds of Israel. 
If the literature of Greece came upon the Romans as an 
anticipation of all they could hope msthetically to effect, 
a treasury of models in verse and prose which they could 
not do more than imitate with some success, upon the 
Hebrews, whose idea of literature had always been 
didactic and whose language was too inflexible for 
aesthetic purposes, it came as a great philosophic awaken- 
ing, an evidence that other peoples in the world beside 
the sons of Israel had met the same great moral questions, 
and had far surpassed all Hebrew efforts towards their 
solution. To men whose highest spiritual guides had sc 
often appealed to social justice between man and his 
neighbour (as had the Hebrew nabis), with what force 
Platonic discussions on “ What is Justice?” must have 
come home ! To men whose spiritual guides had been 


280 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


sorely perplexed by the ethics of inherited guilt (as had 
Ezekiel), how profoundly interesting must the Greek 
ideas of personal conscience have proved ! Above all, 
how deeply must such an essay as Plato’s Phsedo have 
affected men who, like Qoheleth, had experienced the 
emptiness of an individual life, with no outlook save 
on a stream of humanity ever flowing in the same 
circle, and ever returning to the earth from whence it 
rose ! 

§ 74. If we contrast the Book of Wisdom with that 
of Qoheleth, we shall have an insight into these Greek 
influences. The Socratic identification of knowledge 
with virtue, of wisdom with justice, was sure to commend 
itself to the Hebrew mind, so long accustomed to mingle 
ideas of intellectual and moral excellence. Accordingly, 
the author of the Wisdom of Solomon makes Sophia or 
Wisdom the spirit of intellectual and moral power. 
Sophia will not enter “ into a soul of evil arts ” (elg kciko- 
rexvov \pv\riv), nor dwell “ in a body subjected to sin ” 
(ip aujACLTi KardxpSM d/uapTiag). She is a “ humane spirit ” 
(< pi\dvOp(i)Trov Trvtvpa), and stands altogether apart from 
and superior to that spirit (ruach) common to man and 
beast of which Qoheleth spoke. While we have here 
the humanising ideas of the Greek, ideas which found 
it equally hard to absorb the life of man into the general 
life of animals or of the physical world, Sophia is a 
direct rebuke to the pessimism of Qoheleth. “ God did 
not make Death, nor is He pleased with the destruction of 
the living. For He created all things for existence (tie to 
avat), and the races of the world are worthy to be pre- 
served (< Twn'ipioi ) ; the poison of destruction is not in 
them, nor is the kingdom of Death (oSou j3 amXuov) upon 
earth. For justice is immortal ; but impure men by 
deed and thought have summoned Death to themselves, 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 281 

thinking him a friend have been consumed, and have 
made a compact with him because they are worthy to 
take part with him. For, reasoning wrongly with them- 
selves they said, * Short and painful is our life ; there 
is no healing in the end of man, and never was there 
known a man who escaped from Hades. For we came 
into life by a chance (auroo-^tStw?), and hereafter we 
shall be as though we had never been, because the breath 
in our nostrils is smoke, and reason (6 Xoyoc) is a spark in 
the motion of our heart, which being extinguished, our 
body shall return to ashes and our spirit dissolve like 
empty air. In time our name shall be forgotten and no 
one remember our deeds ; our life shall pass away like 
tracks of cloud, and be scattered like a mist dispelled by 
rays of the sun and overcome by his heat. . . . Come, 
then, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and use the 
possession of them, like youth, with energy. Let us 
satiate ourselves with costly wine and perfumes, and let 
not the flower of Spring pass us by. Let us crown our- 
selves with rosebuds ere they be withered ; let none of 
us lose his share of jollity ; everywhere let us leave 
behind tokens of enjoyment, because this is our portion 
and this our lot. Let us force down the poor just man ; 
let us not spare the widow nor reverence an old man’s 
grey hairs. Be Might (17 lux^e) the law of right, for 
weakness is proved useless.’ . . . This was their calcu- 
lation ; and they went wrong ; for their own wickedness 
blinded them. They knew not God’s mysteries, nor 
expected wages of righteousness, nor discerned a reward 
of blameless souls. For God created man for immor- 
tality (tV a<j) 0 apijtq), and made him an image of His 
Eternal Self.* But by Satan’s envy Death entered into 

* eiKova rrjs 15'ias tSionjroy, lit. “an image of the Idea of His Person- 
ality ” — a thoroughly Platonic phrase. 


282 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the universe ( Kocr/uog ), and they who are on his side find 
it.” * 

If the web of this remarkable passage is Hebrew, 
the woof is Greek. The Hebrew pessimism of Qoheleth 
meets the Greek horror of old age ; the old Hebrew con- 
ceptions of social justice and respect for old age are 
found in the company of action from self-interest, sup- 
ported by the iron rule of Force, and that contempt of 
old age which students of Alexandrian literature have 
frequently observed. But, above all, the Greek realisa- 
tion of personality and the Platonic sanction for per- 
sonal morality in a future state meet and correct the 
despairing nihilism of Qoheleth. In this juncture con- 
sists the abiding interest of Alexandrian Judmism ; the 
personal ideas of the Greek are now united with the 
social ideas of the Hebrew. For neither the old clan 
morality, nor the ideal brotherhood of social life which 
had started within the narrow circle of the clan, could 
disappear even among educated Hebrews writing in the 
flush of Hellenic inspiration. Side by side with the 
Greek conceptions of individual punishment or reward 
in a future state, we have survivals from the old mundane 
morality of punishment or reward within the present 
life. “The ends of the unjust race,” says even the 
Platonic author of the Sophia, “ are hard ; the children 
of the wicked shall vanish ; for, though they be long- 
lived, they shall be counted for nothing, and, at the end, 
their old age shall be dishonoured.” 

§ 75. If communal sentiments thus survived in the 
llellenised culture of the educated Hebrew, how much 
deeper must the sentiments of early Hebrew social life 
have been cherished in the hearts of the Hebrew poor ? 
From the pages of Ezra and Nehemiah we may gather 
* Wisdom of Solomon, i. 13— ii. 24. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 283 

that the body of the returned exiles retained the old 
clan organisation ; and, however this system may have 
been broken down by the individualising spirit among 
scribes and priests, there can be little doubt that the 
Hebrew village community not only lasted far on into 
Roman times, but (as the Russian Mir to the contem- 
porary communism of Russian reformers) supplied a 
constant model of social reform and an ideal of Hebrew 
brotherhood which only needed the touch of the 
Greek spirit to become cosmopolitan. Such an effort 
at social reform may be seen in the Essenes, a sect which, 
retiring from the outward ceremonial of the temple, 
practised community of property. Josephus, in a pecu- 
liarly interesting chapter of his Wars of the Jews * gives 
us an account of this remarkable sect, which shows that 
it united the character of social reformers with the 
deepest personal morality. Basing their social reforms 
on a return to clan communism — “ those who come to 
them,” says Josephus, “must let what they have be 
common to the whole order, insomuch that among them 
all there is no appearance of poverty or excess of riches, 
but every one’s possessions are intermingled with every 
other’s, and so there is, as it were, one patrimony among 
all the brethren ” — the Essenes in their conception of the 
soul and their self-discipline were culturists in the highest 
sense of the word. “Their doctrine,” Josephus observes, 
“ is that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they 
are made of is not permanent ; but that the souls are 
immortal and continue for ever, and that they come out 
of the most subtle air, and are united to their bodies 
as in prisons, but that when they are set free from the 
bonds of the flesh they then, as released from a long 
bondage, rejoice and mount upward.” The resemblance 
* Bk. ii. cli. viii. 


284 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of these ideas to certain opinions of the Greeks is care- 
fully noted by Josephus; and the famous passage of 
the Phaedo , which contains the same simile of an im- 
prisoned soul, will come to the mind of any Greek 
scholar. 

But the true interest of the Essenes lies not so much 
in their adoption of Greek conceptions of personality as 
in their combining this individual culture with socialism 
of an advanced type. If in Ezekiel we have individualism 
struggling to get free from clan ethics, if in Qoheletli 
we have it freed from such ethics but bound up with 
pessimism, if in the Sophia of Solomon we have it 
ennobled by Greek conceptions of immortality, in the 
Essenes we have this eternal conception of individuality 
joining with the old social spirit of the Hebrews no 
longer confined within the limits of nationality. Spiri- 
tualised socialism and spiritualised individualism thus 
meet in the Essenes ; and in Christianity they meet in 
a world-creed. But, it may be asked, was their meeting 
of any significance to literature ? Are we justified in 
regarding that union of Hebrew and Greek thought 
which ultimately issued in Christianity as lying within 
the domain of comparative literature? And, if this 
question be answered in the affirmative, are we justified 
in regarding the social as the dominant aspect of Chris- 
tian world-literature ? 

In answer to the first of these questions — whether the 
union of Hebrew and Greek thought issuing in Christianity 
lies within the domain of comparative literature — it will 
be conceded that the cosmopolitan tendencies of the 
Alexandrian Greeks and those of Post-Babylonian 
Hebrews are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to form 
an interesting study in literature treated comparatively. 
Athens and Jerusalem, taking their origin alike in those 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 285 

miniature social groups which we have preferred to call 
by the general name of clan, passed out upon two ideal 
worlds of spiritual influence — the world of individual 
self-culture and the world of social brotherhood. Unlike 
the vigorous human life of Athens— the life of the 
Ekklesia, the law-courts, the theatre — the city of Jeru- 
salem owed its dignity to a religious centralism which 
recalls the Delphic Amphiktiony or the Koreish and 
Mecca. Here there was little scope for the development 
of the purely individual spirit compared with the varied 
field of Athenian activities. Surrounded by agricultural 
communities based on the clan organisation, and with 
its own hierarchy formed on the same model, Jerusalem 
could never become a congenial home for individualism ; 
whatever steps it made within the circle of the priesthood 
and landowning nobility (chorim), individualism must 
have always presented an invidious aspect to Hebrew 
associations. Hence, when we find in Christianity the 
meeting-place of two such divine spirits, each the master- 
spirit of its own sphere, are we not warranted in maintain- 
ing that no more profoundly interesting problem is to 
be found in the whole range of human thought than the 
progress of that Hebrew and Greek cosmopolitanism 
through which the social and individual spirits sought 
reconciliation ? No doubt it may be replied that this 
is matter of ethical rather than literary interest ; that the 
function of literature is to collect and build with the most 
beautiful ideas irrespective of their moral significance. 
But it is one thing to resolve literature into didactic 
prose or verse, and another to maintain that the “ best 
ideas ” which literature seeks to discover and express 
must be valued after standards which involve either an 
ideal of individual self-culture or an ideal of social happi- 
ness ; must, in other words, represent either the Greek or 


286 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the Hebrew spirit, or possibly endeavour to combine both. 
Any literature which really mirrors human life, any 
literature which is something greater and nobler than 
a graceful imitation of classical models, must ultimately 
derive its inspiration from individual or social being, or 
(the most life-giving of all sources) from that conflict 
between these aspects of human existence which has 
raged so fiercely in certain epochs of man’s development. 

Yet another question remains to be answered — are we 
justified in regarding the social as the dominant aspect 
of Christian world-literature, are we justified in treating 
the teaching of Christ and his disciples as the most 
splendid example of the social spirit in world-literature ? 
No doubt the Christian idea of personal immortality is 
widely removed from the clan ethics of inherited guilt, 
and would seem at first sight to be conceived in a purely 
Greek spirit of individualism. But the kernel of Greek 
individualism — action from self-interest — is not to be found 
in the Christian literature. Far from this, the funda- 
mental doctrines of Christianity — inheritance of sin by 
every member of the human race, and the vicarious 
punishment of Christ — are the ethics of early Hebrew 
life universalised ; and ideas of social brotherhood, 
besides being practically expressed in early Christian 
communism, meet us everywhere in extant accounts of 
the great social Reformer. It is true that Christianity, 
as a grand social reformation, is far from having yet 
produced the fruits which it seems destined to bear. It 
is true that in the conditions of the Roman empire — 
its cruel slavery of man, its intense selfishness, its 
accepted materialism — the sufferings of the early Chris- 
tians and the hopelessness of social reform turned away 
Christian thought from the realisation of the human ideal 
society to an ideal beyond the range of space and time. 


THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE. 287 

But none the less evident are the marks of the old Hebrew 
social idealism on the Christian, none the less clear is it 
that the ideal community of Ezekiel is spiritualised and 
universalised in the Christian brotherhood, and that, how- 
ever the conditions of the Roman empire, or the temporal 
power Christianity afterwards acquired, or the industrial 
development of modern Europe, have thrown the social 
spirit of Christianity into the background, the creed 
whose individual side was expressed by Dante was above 
all things the mighty utterance of man’s social spirit. 


288 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CHAPTER IV. 

WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 

§ 76. If Israel and Hellas have respectively offered us 
examples of world-literature in which the social and 
individual spirits predominate, the characteristics of 
Indian literature may he found in its apparently peaceful 
union of these conflicting spirits, accompanied by a senti- 
ment of the beautiful in nature equally removed from 
the humanising nature-poetry of the Greek and the 
monotheistic feelings of the Hebrew, who heard the voice 
of Yahveh in the thunder, and saw his arrows in the 
lightning shot forth on the wings of the wind. But in 
its earliest beginnings Indian literature contained little 
indication of the widely philosophic course it was to 
pursue, or the union of the individual and social spirits 
it was to attain. 

Taking a bird’s-eye view of Indian development — for 
it is a mere error of ignorance to suppose that the East 
in general, and India in particular, have always been the 
home of social stagnation — we may divide it into certain 
periods derived either from social or linguistic facts. In 
the earliest, or Vedic,* age (so called from the collection 

* “Veda” is from the same root as “ videre,” Fe/So, “wit,” “ wisdom 
for the Brahmans taught the divine inspiration of the Veda as the 
“ wisdom of God.” 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 289 

of hymns believed to represent it) we find the Indian 
Aryans making their settlements in the Panjab. The 
earliest memorial of these settlements, the Rig-Yeda, 
is a hymnal of unknown age, though from astronomical 
dates it has been inferred with some probability by 
European scholars that about 1400 b.c. its composi- 
tion was still going on. Containing 1017 short hymns, 
consisting in all of 10,580 verses, the Rig-Yeda displays 
a picture of social life in many respects different from 
any we might imagine from later Indian literature. 
Among the Aryans, now on the banks of the Indus, the 
agricultural village community has not yet completely 
supplanted the “ cattle-pens ” of an older pastoral life ; 
and, as in Homeric, early Hebrew, and early Arab times, 
the chief symbol of wealth is cattle. Divided into 
various tribes, sometimes at war with themselves, these 
conquering Aryans occasionally unite against the “black- 
skinned” aborigines whom they call Dasyus, or “enemies,” 
and Dasas, or “ slaves.” But though they pride them- 
selves on their fair complexion, and though the Sanskrit 
word for “ colour ” (varna) is destined to mark this old 
difference between the fair-skinned Aryan and his dusky 
foes by becoming a synonym for “ race ” or “ caste,” the 
system of caste in its later sense is still unknown. “ Each 
father of the family,” says Dr. Hunter, whose valuable 
works on Indian history and social life should be in the 
hands of every student of Indian languages and antiqui- 
ties, “ is the priest of his own household. The chieftain 
acts as father and priest to the tribe ; but at the greater 
festivals he chooses some one specially learned in holy 
offerings to conduct the sacrifice in the name of the 
people.” Thus the Brahman priesthood, destined to 
become the great organisers of caste, have as yet no fixed 
place in the social ’ order. Moreover, kingship seems to 


290 


COMr AK ATI V E LITERATURE. 


be elective ; and not only do women enjoy a high posi- 
tion (marriage being held sacred, husband and wife being 
alike dampati, or “ rulers of the house,” and the burning 
of widows on their husbands’ funeral piles being un- 
known), but even “ some of the most beautiful of the 
hymns were composed by ladies and queens.” 

Among these Indian Aryans, as everywhere in early 
communities, the rude beginnings of literature are found 
in close union with religion ; and here at the very out- 
set we meet one of the great characteristics of Indian 
literature — the love of Nature. The divinities of the 
Aryan housefathers — at once priests and warriors and 
husbandmen — are, as Professor Monier Williams has 
observed, idealised and personified powers of Nature— 
the wind, the storm, the fire, the sun — on which, as an 
agricultural and pastoral people, their welfare depended. 
Such deities of Nature are Dyaush-pitar (Diespiter or 
Jupiter of Rome, Zeus of Greece), or the sky-father; 
Varuna,* or the encompassing air ; Indra, or the aqueous 
vapour that brings the rains, to whom many of the 
hymns are addressed ; Agni, the god of fire, whose name 
is the Latin Ignis ; Ushas, the dawn, the Greek Eos ; 
Vaya, the wind ; Mitra the sunshine ; and the Maruts, or 
storm-gods. As a specimen of the hymns we may select 
one to the Maruts and Indra which is peculiarly interest- 
ing from its rudely dramatic form. The translation, it 
should be added, is by Professor Max Muller, to whom 
all students of Sanskrit are so deeply indebted. 

“ Prologue. The Sacrificer speaks ; 1. With what 
splendour are the Maruts all equally endowed, they who 
are of the same age and dwell in the same house ? With 
what thoughts? From whence are they come? Do 
their heroes sing forth their (own) strength because they 
* The Ouranos of Greeoe. 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 21)1 


wish for wealth? 2. Whose prayers have the youth 
accepted? Who has turned the Maruts to his own 
sacrifice ? By what strong devotion may we delight 
them, they who float through the air like hawks ? 

“ Dialogue. The Maruts speak ; 3. From whence, 0 
Indra, dost thou come alone, thou who art mighty ? 0 
lord of men, what has thus happened to thee? Thou 
greetest (us) when thou comest together with (us), the 
bright Maruts ? Tell us, then, thou with thy bay horses, 
what thou hast against us ! 

“ Indra speaks ; 4. The sacred songs are mine, (mine 
are) the prayers ; sweet are the libations ! My strength 
rises, my thunderbolt is hurled forth. They call for me, 
the prayers * yearn for me. Here are my horses, they 
carry me towards them. 

“ The Maruts speak ; 5. Therefore in company with 
our strong friends, having adorned our bodies, we now 
harness our fallow deer with all our might; for, Indra, 
according to thy custom thou hast been with us. 

“ Indra speaks ; 6. Where, 0 Maruts, was that custom 
of yours, that you should join me who am alone in the 
killing of Alii ? I, indeed, am terrible, strong, powerful 
— I escaped from the blows of every enemy. 

“ The Maruts speak ; 7. Thou hast achieved much 
with us as companions. With the same valour, 0 hero, 
let us achieve then many things, 0 thou most powerful, 
O Indra ! whatever we, 0 Maruts, wish with our hearts. 

“Indra speaks; 8 . I slew Yrita, O Maruts, with 
(Indra’s) might, having grown strong through my own 
vigour ; I, who hold the thunderbolt in my arms, have 
made these all-brilliant waters to flow freely for man. 

“ The Maruts speak ; 9. Nothing, 0 powerful lord, is 

# Similar personifications might be easily quoted from cur European 
mystery-plays. 


292 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, 


strong before tliee ; no one is known among the gods like 
unto thee. No one who is now born will come near, no 
one who has been born. Do what has to be done, thou 
who art grown so strong. 

“ Indra speaks; 10. Almighty power be mine alone, 
whatever I may do, daring in my heart ; for I, indeed, O 
Maruts, am known as terrible ; of all that I throw down, 
I, Indra, am the lord. 

“ Indra speaks; 11. O Maruts, now your praise has 
pleased me, the glorious hymn which you have made 
for me, ye men! — for me, for Indra, for the powerful 
hero, as friends for a friend, for your own sake and by 
your own efforts. 

“ Indra speaks ; 12. Truly, there they are, shining 
towards me, assuming blameless glory, assuming vigour. 
O Maruts, wherever I have looked for you, you have 
appeared to me in bright splendour; appear to me also 
now ! 

“ Epilogue. The Sacrijicer speaks ; 13. Who has 
magnified you here, 0 Maruts ? Come hither, 0 friends, 
towards your friends. Ye brilliant Maruts, cherish these 
prayers and be mindful of these my rites. 14. The 
wisdom of Manya has brought us to this, that we should 
help as the poet helps the performer of a sacrifice : bring 
them hither quickly, Maruts, on to the sage these prayers 
the singer has recited for you. 15. This your praise, 0 
Maruts, this your song comes from Mandarya, the son of 
Mana, the poet. Come hither with rain ! May we find 
for ourselves offspring, food, and a camp with running 
water.” 

§ 77. Such a hymn as this shows the beginnings of a 
studied ceremonial sharing iu that dramatic character 
which is more or less common to all rituals, and which in 
the Medieval Mass directly contributed to the creation of 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 293 


our European theatres. Religion is becoming something 
more than a spontaneous worship offered up by the father 
of the family, who is at once its prophet, priest, and 
king ; the poet helps the performer of the sacrifice, the 
singer recites the poet’s studied prayer ; and the prologue 
— which reminds us of the religious prologues to the 
much later Indian dramas — the dialogue, and epilogue, 
even if they are quite unconnected with the development 
of the Indian theatre, are at least signs of a literary class. 
The rise of this literary class forms the second great 
period into which the evolution of Indian life may be 
divided. 

The earliest Yedic hymns exhibit the Indian Aryant 
still to the north of the Khaibar Pass, in Kabul; the 
later bring them as far as the Ganges, and " their vic- 
torious advance eastwards through the intermediate tract- 
can be traced in the Yedic writings almost step by step.” 
In the train of conquest came the development of a higher 
social organisation than that of the pastoral communities 
which had been attracted by the steady water-supply of 
the Panjab, and had settled in scattered groups of hus- 
bandmen. In these old Aryan colonies of the Panjab 
division of mental and manual labour had been wanting ; 
“each housefather had been husbandman, warrior, and 
priest. But by degrees certain gifted families, who com- 
posed the Yedic hymns or learned them off by heart, 
were always chosen by the king to perform the great 
sacrifices. In this w ay probably the priestly caste sprang 
up.” Fortunate warriors or companions of the king, too, 
like the comitatus of German tribes, received grants of 
conquered territory which the non- Aryans cultivated as 
serfs; hence the warrior-caste, called Rajputs or Kshat- 
triyas — the latter term meaning “ of the royal stock ” — 
and the Sudras or non-Aryans reduced by conquest to 


294 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


serfdom. Moreover, the agricultural settlers, Yaisyas, 
who in the early Yedic period had included all Aryans, 
came to be distinguished alike from the warriors and the 
serfs ; and so there came to be four castes, three of Aryan 
descent, known as the “ Twice-born,” and one non- Aryan. 

How far this social classification was the work of the 
Brahmans, or priestly caste, during or after their struggle 
for supremacy with the Kshattriyas, it is clearly impossible 
now to decide with precision — especially since the very 
idea of caste in modern India has been rendered exceed- 
ingly complex by countless varieties of castes due, not to 
these facts of ancient Indian history, nor to direct Brah- 
mauic creation, but merely to the hereditary character 
of trades and occupations. But, since the Brahmans have 
ever been the makers of Indian literature, the problem of 
the “ natural” versus the artificial development of caste 
need not here be discussed. Whatever different causes, 
however, have contributed to create the Indian caste- 
system — ancient clan life, the village community, differ- 
ences of race and occupation, priestly law-books and 
ritual — it is plain that the influence of a social fact and 
idea which must so profoundly affect the conception of 
individuality cannot be overlooked in any view of Indian 
literature however brief. But before we trace some Brah- 
manic influences on Indian literature we shall turn aside 
for a moment to compare the beginnings of literature in 
China with the Yedic hymns. 

§ 78. The ancient collection of Chinese odes known 
as the Shih King offers the most striking contrasts in 
form and spirit, in social and individual characteristics, 
to these ancient hymns of India. China, like India, was 
destined to give birth to a literature which, reflecting 
human life on a vast scale and deeply imbued with senti- 
ments of Nature, was to expand its horizon beyond national 


WOItLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 295 


destinies and become a world-literature full of philosophic 
efforts to explain the past, the present, and the future of 
the human species. But China, like India, had her day 
of small things, of local distinctions, of feudal states ; and 
from this early period the Shih, or at least some of its 
odes, would seem to date. 

The Shih, consisting of 305 pieces, the most recent of 
which are assigned to B.c. 606-586, the oldest to the 
period of the Shang dynasty 1766-1123 B.c., is divided 
into four parts. 1. The Kwo Fang , “ Manners of the 
different States,” or, as Dr. Legge prefers to translate, 
“ Lessons from the States,” are 160 short pieces descrip- 
tive of manners and events in the feudal states of Kau. 
2. The Hsiao Yd , or “ Minor Odes of the Kingdom,” are 
74 pieces, “ sung at the gatherings of the feudal princes 
and their appearances at the royal court.” 3. The Yd Yd, 
or “ Major Odes of the Kingdom,” are 31 pieces, “ sung 
on great occasions at the royal court and in the presence 
of the king.” 4. Lastly, the Sung consist of 40 pieces, 
31 of which belong to the sacrificial services at the royal 
court of Kau, the rest to those of the marquises of Lu 
and the kings of Shang. Chinese authorities speak of 
the Sung as “ songs for the music of the ancestral temple,” 
and “ songs for the music at sacrifices ; ” and Dr. Legge, 
uniting these definitions, would call them “ odes of the 
temple and the altar.” 

It would seem that some at least of these odes were 
collected in the capital from the music-masters of the 
various states; and their repetitions or refrains indicate 
a spirit at once secular and musical, which, like the four- 
syllabled lines in which they are for the most part com- 
posed, contrasts remarkably with the difficult metrical 
forms and highly religious tone of the Indian hymns. 
The subordination of the sacrificial to the secular aspect, 


296 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


moreover, is supplemented by a wide difference in the 
spirit of the pieces which are professedly religious com- 
pared with the Indian hymns. It is the ancestral worship 
of /the family which is celebrated in the Sacrificial Odes 
of the Shih, a worship destined to afford no scope for the 
development of caste or Brahman priesthood ; and, though 
some of the odes are in worship of Nature, they remind 
us rather of the utilitarian mythology of early Rome 
than the splendid adoration of Nature in the Vedas. 
Not that Nature is less prominent in the Shih than in 
the Indian hymns; for there is scarcely an ode of the 
Shih which does not turn upon some aspect of Nature — 
“the ospreys with their hwan-kwan on the islet in the 
river,” “the yellow birds flying about the spreading 
dolichos.” Almost every ode is decked with phrases 
borrowed from physical or animal life — “the swallows 
flying about with their wings unevenly displayed,” “ the 
wind that blows with clouds of dust,” “ the dead antelope 
in the wild wrapped up in the white grass.” But in these 
and similar expressions we have rather simple family life 
enjoying the sights and sounds of Nature than any of that 
majestic imagery and profound reverence for Nature’s life 
which the Sanskrit poems reveal. The same homely 
sympathy with Nature is to be found in certain speci- 
mens of ancient Chinese poetry, which have been assigned 
(but on questionable grounds, in Dr. Legge’s opinion) 
as high or even higher antiquity than the Shih King. 
Among these may be quoted the “ Song of the Peasants 
in the time of Yaou : ” — 

‘‘We rise at sunrise, 

We rest at sunset, 

Dig wells and drink, 

Till our fields and eat — 

What is the strength of the emperor to us? ” 

And from the same specimens the “ Prayer at the 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 297 


Winter Thanksgiving,” “ ShuiTs Song of the South 
Wind,” the “Song of the Fern-Gatherers,” and the 
“ Cowfeeder’s Song,” beginning — 

“ On the bare southern hill 
The white rocks gleam” — 

might be cited as also illustrating ancient Chinese sym- 
pathies with Nature as a good friend rather than a great 
god. 

In fact, the religious sentiments of the Chinese were 
with their social evolution assuming a different channel 
from that of the Indian Aryans ; and though we have 
early Chinese songs to the powers of Nature as productive 
agents, the most profound sentiments of Chinese religion 
were turned away from Nature to the ancestors of the 
human family, the centre of all Chinese passions and 
emotions. Accordingly, while the Brahmans were build- 
ing up their sacred hymnal to Nature in her grandest 
forms, the ancestral spirits were in China receiving the 
mead of sacrificial song. With a specimen of such song * 
we shall conclude this brief contrast of early Indian and 
Chinese poetry. 

“ Ah, ah, our meritorious ancestor ! 

Permanent are the blessings coming from him, 

Repeatedly confirmed without end : — 

They have come to you in this place. 

“ The clear spirits are in our vessels. 

And there is granted to us the realisation of our thoughts. 

There are also the well-tempered soups 

Prepared beforehand, the ingredients rightly proportioned. 

By these offerings we invite his presence, without a word, 

Nor is there now any contention (in any part of the service). 

He will bless us with the eyebrows of longevity, 

With the grey hair and wrinkled face in unlimited degree. 

With the naves of their wheels bound with leather, and their orna- 
mented yokes, 

With the eight bells at their horses’ bits all tinkling, 


* Fr in Dr. Legge’s Chinese Classics , vol. iv. pt. 2. 


298 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


(Tlio Princes) come and assist at the offerings. 

We have received the appointment in all its greatness, 

And from Heaveu is our prosperity sent down, 

Fruitful years of great abundance. 

(Our ancestor) will come and enjoy (our offerings), 

And confer (on us) happiness without limit. 

“ May he regard our sacrifices in summer and winter, 

(Thus) offered by the descendant of Y’ang.” 

§ 79. During the growth of the Brahman caste in India, 
the old ritual-book of the Big-Veda was supplemented by 
the addition of three other service-books. The Big-Veda 
had been the hymns in their simplest form ; by degrees 
were added the Sama-Veda, or hymns of the Big-Veda, to 
be used at the Soma sacrifice, the Yajur-Veda “ consisting 
not only of Big-Vedic hymns, but also of prose sentences 
to be used at the great sacrifices, and divided into two 
editions, called the Black and White Yajur,” and the 
Atharva-Veda, consisting of the least ancient hymns at 
the end of the Big-Veda and of later poems. To each of 
these four Vedas prose works were in time attached, 
called Brahmanas, explaining the sacrifices and duties of 
the priests, and forming with the Vedas the sruti — 
“ things heard from God ” — or revealed scriptures of the 
Hindus. “The Vedas supplied their divinely inspired 
psalms, and the Brahmanas their divinely inspired 
theology or body of doctrine.” Afterwards were added 
the Sutras — “strings of pithy sentences” — on laws and 
ceremonies, for the Brahmans, like the Hebrew priests, 
were not only the holy guardians of religious ritual, but, 
like the Irish Brehons, interpreters and co-ordinators of 
law never in India very distinctly separated from religion. 
Later on, the Upanishads, treating of God and the soul, 
exemplified that development of philosophy out of reli- 
gion which can be easily illustrated elsewhere than in 
India ; the Aranyakas, or “ tracts for the forest recluse,” 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 299 


marked the rise of that ascetic spirit which Christian 
monasticism has made so familiar to Europe ; and, long 
afterwards, came the Puranas, or “ traditions of old.” 
These writings, however, as distinct from the Vedas and 
Brahmanas, are not sruti, or divinely inspired ; they are 
only smriti — “ things remembered ” — that is, sacred 
traditions. 

How did the Brahmans manage to retain a monopoly 
of this politico-religious literature ? How did they 
prevent any such popularisation of their legal knowledge 
as, for example, followed the publication of the XII. 
Tables at Home? They prevented publication by pre- 
ferring to hand down their learning by memory within 
the sacred circle of their caste, even though as early as 
250 B.c. two alphabets or written characters were used in 
India. “Good Brahmans had to learn the Veda by 
heart, besides many other books. This was the easier, as 
almost all their literature was in verse (slokas). In the 
very ancient times, just after the Vedic hymns, a pure 
style of prose, simple and compact, had grown up. But 
for more than two thousand years the Brahmans have 
always composed in verse ; and prose-writing has been a 
lost art in India.” 

The Brahman period of Indian literature reaches back- 
wards and forwards into very different social and linguistic 
conditions of Indian life in general and of the Brahman 
priesthood in particular. In the earlier period the Brah- 
mans are struggling into independence from the control 
of the military class, and with difficulty establishing their 
priestly ceremonial over the local worships of the House- 
fathers. As yet “ Sanskrit,” as the peculiar language of 
the educated, is unknown ; for the language destined to 
become the sacred language of the Brahmans is still the 
Aryan vernacular speech, the true maker of the “ simple 
14 


300 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and compact prose” which (as Albrecht Weber, in his 
History of. Sanskrit Literature, observes) had been 
gradually developed in the Yedic period. The scientific 
student of literature should note some of the causes 
which checked the growth of Indian prose. 

The development of prose is to a certain extent 
necessarily democratic — it is the everyday speech of 
some social group ; for example, the explanation of the 
prominence of Arabic prose in Arabic literature is to be 
found in its close correspondence with the polished 
speech of the Koreish. Critics have shown how Athe- 
nian conversation, in public or private, is the true source 
of that splendid instrument of thought we call Attic 
prose; and any one who takes the trouble to trace the 
beginnings of prose in England, France, Germany, will 
soon discover the powerful influences of the language 
actually spoken at court, or in the public assemblies, or 
in the private meetings of the educated classes. The 
Brahman caste clearly lacked the freedom and variety of 
social status which in the West contributed so largely to 
the growth of prose. Moreover, prose must be ivritten ; 
for, if there is any point in which students of early 
literature are at length tolerably unanimous, it is the 
impossibility of making and retaining a prose work by 
the aid of the memory alone. But here the exclusiveness 
of Brahman learning, the desire to prevent popularisation 
by writing, threw a serious obstacle in the way of prose 
development. Again, in the extended conquests of the 
Aryans — as was afterwards to happen to Latin and Arabic 
— the purity of the old Aryan tongue was being impaired 
by contact with barbarian languages, and the need of a 
uniform standard in Aryan speech was more and more 
experienced ; and so the Brahmans, as the keepers of the 
most ancient records, possessed a monopoly not only of 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 301 


religious and political knowledge, but also of the purer 
literary language. Hence, by degrees, popular Prakritic 
dialects arose out of the ancient Indo- Aryan vernacular, 
and marked differences began to manifest themselves 
between these spoken dialects and the language of the 
educated class or “ Sanskrit.” The latter gradually 
ceasing to be a spoken language, and becoming the 
peculiar property of a class which desired as little as 
possible to entrust its knowledge to a written form in 
which it might cease to be a monopoly, it is easy to see 
why the prose-form, of days when the speech of the 
educated and uneducated had been the same, was aban- 
doned, and (as Weber says) “ a rhythmic one adopted in 
its stead, which is employed exclusively even for strictly 
scientific explanation.” Indian prose, indeed, we have in 
the grammatical and philosophical Sutras, but a prose 
“ characterised by a form of expression so condensed and 
technical that it cannot properly be so called. Apart 
from this, we have only fragments of prose, occurring in 
stories which are now and then found cited in the great 
epic ; and, farther, in the fable literature and in the 
drama ; but they are uniformly interwoven with rhyth- 
mical portions. It is only in the Buddhist legends that a 
prose style has been retained. . . . Anything more clumsy 
than the prose of the later Indian romances and of the 
Indian commentaries can hardly be conceived ; and the 
same may be said of the prose of the inscriptions. . . . 
Works of poetry, of science and art, and works relating to 
law, custom, and worship, all alike appear in a poetic form ; 
and while, on the one hand, the poetic form has been 
extended to all branches of the literature, upon the other, 
a good deal of practical prose has entered into the poetry 
itself, imparting to it the character of poetry with a 
purpose ” (Weber). 


302 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


§ 80. It is evident that a language which had thus 
fallen into the possession of a priestly caste is not likely 
to enshrine a literature in any sense of the word popular. 
But in dealing with the literature of India we must 
remember that it is really an error to transfer our 
European conceptions of “ people ” and “ popular ” — 
conceptions which are not strictly applicable to the slave- 
supported municipalities of Greece and Rome, and which 
even in modern Europe mark the last links in a long 
line of development from the serfdom and communes of 
the Middle Ages — to the many races, languages, and 
caste-distinctions of that vast country which we briefly 
name “ India.” Without some language standing apart 
from the many varieties of daily speech and some privi- 
leged caste to keep watch and ward over its treasures, 
it is difficult to conceive how India, especially in the face 
of Greek, Scythic, and Mohammedan conquests, could 
have produced or retained a literature at all. If, indeed, 
the monopoly of the Brahmans had received no serious 
checks, if no development of new sects and no intro- 
duction of foreign thought by conquest had left them 
sole masters of the religious, political, and literary tra- 
ditions of India, it is probable that Sanskrit literature 
might never have advanced much beyond ritual books 
like the Yedas, law treatises full of Brahman interests, 
and chronicles combining myth and history in incal- 
culable proportions. But for Brahman exclusiveness an 
aufldarung was reserved. 

In 543 b.c., at the age of eighty, died a reformer 
worthy of being placed beside, if not above, the greatest 
our Western world has known. Gautama Buddha — “ the 
Enlightened ” — had renounced his royal rank as only 
son of a king, passed through years of hermitage and 
penance, and, from his thirty-sixth year, entered upon 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 303 


that public teaching which, unlike the exclusiveness 
of Brahmans, sought disciples not merely among the 
sacred caste but in all ranks and conditions of men. In 
the spirit of that old Hebrew prophet who, rising above 
the formalism of Israel’s priests, asked “ to what purpose 
is the multitude of your sacrifices?” Buddha put in the 
place of the Brahman sacrifices three great duties — con- 
trol over self, kindness to other men, and reverence for 
the life of all sentient creatures. Just as the formalism 
of Hebrew priest-lawyers had reposed upon an ethical 
creed in which the individual’s responsibility had been 
merged into collective, just as prophets like Jeremiah 
and Ezekiel, nearly at Buddha’s own date, were preaching 
personal responsibility against the worn-out clan morality 
of inherited guilt, so Buddha, preaching salvation equally 
to all men without the intercession of the Brahman, in- 
sisted on individual responsibility, and taught that man’s 
state, in this life, in all previous and in all future lives, 
must be the result of his own acts. 

But if Buddha’s teaching resembles the spiritual 
teaching of Isaiah, if it resembles the individual ethics 
of Ezekiel, it also contains something of the pessimism 
of Qoheleth. Human life, in Buddha’s view, must always 
be painful, more or less ; “ the object of every good man 
is to get rid of the evils of existence by merging his in- 
dividual soul into the universal soul.” “ Two souls,” 
says Faust, “ dwell within my breast ; the one would fain 
separate itself from the other. The one clings to the 
world with organs like cramps of steel; the other lifts 
itself energetically from the mist to the realms of an 
exalted ancestry.” Buddha, like Goethe, like Qoheleth, 
is living in an age when the contrast of the individual 
with the group, of the microcosm self with the macro- 
cosm not-self, has forced itself on human thought. But 


304 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


his reconciliation of the conflicting principles is not 
found in that despairful materialism in which the Hebrew 
thinker watches with anguish all individual distinctions, 
nay, even the differences between men and brutes, dis- 
appear; it is found in a pantheistic moral ideal — that 
Nirvana, “Cessation,” absorption of the individual into 
the universal soul, which is only to be reached by a per- 
sonal life of moral excellence. M. Guizot has remarked 
that the general acceptance of feudalism in Europe is 
the best evidence of its necessity ; perhaps a similar 
remark may be made on the rapid extension of Buddhism, 
which at least shows that Brahmanism in its early exclu- 
sive form had worn out the prestige of its pretensions. 
Buddhism, about 257 B.C., became a State religion ; and 
though, after 800 A.D., Brahmanism again gradually 
became the ruling religion, five hundred millions of 
Buddhists in Asia venerate to-day the memory of Gau- 
tama, “ the Enlightened.” 

§ 81. It was during the domination of Buddhism that 
Sanskrit literature displayed its nearest approach to a 
popular form in its drama. But before we touch upon 
this form of Sanskrit literature we must briefly review 
another — the epic. Perhaps the earliest traces of the 
Indian epic may be carried as far back as the Veda ; 
certain it is, as Professor Monier Williams has said, that 
not only is the germ of many legends in Hindu epic 
poetry to be found in the Rig- Veda, but such poetry is 
there foreshadowed in hymns and songs laudatory of 
Indra and other gods supposed to protect the Aryan 
from the non- Aryan races. In fact, when we remember 
the dramatic shape of the hymn quoted above, it is 
allowable to say that lyric, epic, and dramatic elements 
are all to be found in the Rig-Veda. But, dismissing 
the question of the exact process by which Indian epic 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 305 


poetry grew up as one too intricate for the space at our 
disposal, we shall turn to the two most famous Indian 
epics, and the points of comparison or contrast to similar 
European poetry which they suggest. 

Of these two epics, the Ramayana contains the story 
of the Aryan advance into India, while the Mahabharata 
may be regarded as metrical romance-chronicles of the 
Delhi kings. The oldest of these epics, the Ramayana 
(“the adventures of Rama,” from the Sanskrit Rama 
and ayana), is said to have been composed by the poet 
Yalnriki. “For centuries,” says Professor Williams, “its 
existence was probably oral ; and we know from the 
fourth chapter of the first book that it had its minstrels 
and reciters like the Greek pa.\fnpdot” The antiquity of 
Sanskrit, like Hebrew, literature cannot be fixed with 
certainty, and depends on internal evidences contained 
in its various works ; but internal evidences would seem 
to show that a great part of the Ramayana as now known 
to us was current in India as early as the fifth century 
b.c. Rama, though mentioned in the Yeda, may be 
regarded as the first real hero, belonging to the Kshattriya 
or warrior caste, of the post-Yedic age ; and, as evidences 
confirmatory of the date just named, Professor Williams 
mentions the simplicity of style in the Ramayana, its 
want of allusions to Buddhism as an established fact, and 
the marks it contains of that independent spirit of the 
northern military tribes, and that tendency to sceptical 
inquiry even among Brahmans which, working southwards, 
led to the great Buddhist reformation. 

The story of the Ramayana, though often interrupted 
by episodes having little bearing on the plot, is more 
continuous than that of the Mahabharata, the latter 
being written in celebration of the lunar race of Delhi 
kings, as the Ramayana is of the solar race of Ajodya or 


306 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Oudh. Divisible into three principal parts correspond- 
ing with the chief epochs in the life of Kama, the 
Eamayana treats (1) of Rama’s youthful days, education 
at the court of his father, Dasaratha king of Oudh, 
marriage to Sita, and inauguration as heir-apparent or 
Crown Prince; (2) the circumstances leading to his 
banishment, and the description of his exile in the forests 
of Central Asia; (3) his war with the demons of the 
South for the recovery of his wife Sita, carried off by 
their chief Eavana, his victory over Eavana, and his 
restoration to his father’s throne. In the first two 
portions extravagant fiction is sparingly used; in the 
last the wildest exaggeration and hyperbole prevail. 

The Mahabharata is an immense collection of legends, 
so wanting in unity that the episodes occupy three-fourths 
of the entire poem, the size of which may be imagined 
from the fact that it contains 220,000 lines, or, reckoning 
the Iliad, the JEneid, the Divina Commedia , and Paradise 
Lost as together containing 50,000 lines, considerably 
more than four times the bulk of all the great European 
epics put together. In fact, the central story of the 
Mahabharata, which contains 50,000 lines, or about a 
fourth of the whole “ poem,” may be said to equal all 
these European epics in bulk. In truth, it is not one 
“poem” at all, but “a compilation of many poems; not 
a Jcdvya by one author, but an itihasa by many authors.” 

Both the Eamayana and the Mahabharata consist of 
many stories grouped round a central story; but the 
central story of the Mahabharata is a slender thread upon 
which many unconnected legends are strung ; while the 
many episodes of the Eamayana “ never break the solid 
chain of one principal subject which is ever kept in 
view.” The subject of the central story in the Mahabha- 
rata is a struggle between two families, alike descended 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 307 


from the royal Bharata, and brought up under the same 
roof. King Pandu, smitten by a curse, has resigned his 
kingdom to his brother Dhrita-rashtra, retired to a 
hermitage and there died, leaving the five Pandavas, his 
sons, to the care of his brother now ruling in his stead. 
Dhrita-rashtra has himself one hundred sons, named 
Kauravas, from an ancestor Kuru; but, acting as the 
faithful guardian of his nephews, he chooses the eldest 
of the five Pandavas as heir to the family kingdom. His 
own sons resent the act ; hence the quarrel of the hun- 
dred Kauravas with the five Pandavas which forms the 
central story of Mahabharata. 

The period to which this story refers is not later than 
1200 B.c. ; but the composition of the Mahabharata bears 
internal marks of later date than that of the Kamayana. 
Though the later epic includes in its post-Vedic mytho- 
logy many myths which have their germs in the Veda, 
its religious system is “more popular and comprehensive 
than that of the Kamayana ; ” and when it is remem- 
bered that Brahmanism never gained in the more martial 
north that ascendancy which it acquired in the neigh- 
bourhood of Oudh, we are prepared to find that the 
Kamayana, to which this neighbourhood gave birth, 
“generally represents one-sided and exclusive Brahman- 
ism,” while the Mahabharata, celebrating the Delhi 
kings, is less inspired by the exclusiveness of the sacred 
caste, and (as Professor Williams observes) “represents 
the multilateral character of Hinduism.” In the Maha- 
bharata the individualising spirit of Buddha is marked by 
the introduction of more human and popular personages 
and less mythical allegory than are to be found in the 
Kamayana — a humanising process which may be com- 
pared with that which has been previously observed in 
the Athenian drama, and which will hereafter be noticed 


308 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


in the relation of miracle-plays to the modern European 
drama. So, also, the Mahabharata contains “many more 
illustrations of domestic and social life and manners than 
the more ancient epic.’’ 

But while such differences as these present them- 
selves in a comparison of the two great Indian epics, 
differences to be regarded as indicating literary sym- 
pathies gradually widening beyond the narrow circle of 
Brahmanic interests and expanding towards a width 
sufficient for the creation of a drama under royal patron- 
age, the European scholar will probably contrast with 
greater interest the Indian with our own European epics, 
especially the Iliad and Odyssey. A vast range of human 
interests, diversities of language and race, varieties and 
sharp contrasts of caste, consciousness of intricate dis- 
tinctions in social life, will account for the disorderly 
universalism of the Indian epics compared with the far 
greater uniformity but also narrowly local interests of 
the Greek. If in the Iliad time, place, action, are 
restricted within comparatively narrow limits, if even 
the wider circle of the Odyssey is insignificant compared 
with the almost unbounded range of the Mahabharata, 
the social and physical differences under which the 
Indian and Greek poets lived are amply sufficient to 
explain their diverse treatment of time, place, and action, 
a diversity which we shall find repeated in the Greek 
and Sanskrit dramas. Just as the similes of the Indian 
epics are taken from the movements of Asiatic animals — 
the tiger, the elephant— or from the peculiar aspects of 
Indian plants, the Sanskrit dictionary itself marking the 
profusion of Indian flowers by the number of its botanical 
terms, so graphic and picturesque descriptions of scenery, 
alike in the epics and dramas of India, reflect not only 
“ the whole appearance of external nature in the East, 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 309 


the exuberance of vegetation, the wealth of trees and 
fruits and flowers, the glow of burning skies, the fresh- 
ness of the rainy season, the fury of storms, the serenity 
of Indian moonlight, and the gigantic mould in which 
natural objects are generally cast,” but also a state of 
social life in which the primary units are not the city 
and the citizen, but the agricultural village and its 
communal brethren redolent of Nature’s life. We may 
say, then, that the great differences between the Indian 
and Greek epics are the fantastic intermixture (not 
merely, as in the Iliad, the juxtaposition) of gods, heroes, 
men, and the vast extension of space and time in the 
former, characteristics also accompanied by a profound 
sympathy with physical nature which, in spite of a few 
well-known passages, may be said to be singularly absent 
from the Greek epics. 

Whether the cause is to be found in the unsuitable- 
ness of the Chinese language for a long poem, or in 
conditions of social life in China, or in both, nothing 
resembling an epic has been discovered in Chinese litera- 
ture by European scholars. The Indian epics have thus 
no Chinese analogue to be here noticed, and we may 
pass on to another species of Indian literature. The 
individualising spirit of Buddha’s age and the human- 
ising tone of the Mahabharata, contrasted with the Brail- 
manic narrowness of the older epic, have already called 
our attention to that expansion of social sympathies and 
deepening of individual conscience which in India, as in 
Greece, preceded and accompanied the rise of the drama; 
and, since the differences between the Greek and Indian 
epics just noticed are much the same as those between 
the Greek and Indian theatres, we may take the present 
opportunity to pass on to the Sanskrit drama. 

§ 82. Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, maintained 


310 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


that “ the connection of poetry and social good is more 
observable in the drama than in any other form ; and it 
is indisputable that the highest perfection of human 
society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic 
excellence, and that the corruption or extinction of the 
drama in a nation where it has once flourished marks a 
corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies 
which sustain the soul of social life ; for the end of 
social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure.” 
How far these observations are true, and what is the 
kind of social life which produces the best drama, we 
need not here inquire. We shall at least admit with 
Shelley the peculiarly close relations of the drama with 
social life, and agree with Professor H. Id. Wilson when 
he says, in his admirable Theatre of the Hindus , that 
“ there is no species of composition which embraces so 
many purposes as the dramatic. The dialogue varies 
from simple to elaborate, from the conversation of ordi- 
nary life to the highest refinements of poetical taste. 
The illustrations are drawn from every known product 
of art as well as every observable phenomenon of Nature. 
The manners and feelings of the people are delineated, 
living and breathing before us, and history and religion 
furnish most important and interesting topics to the poet.” 

But we must be prepared at the outset to allow for 
certain peculiarities of the Indian drama which, although 
by no means rendering the Hindu theatre a monopoly of 
the sacred caste, prevent it from being a perfect mirror 
of Indian life. In one respect the Indian theatre differs 
from that of any other people. Every play is for the 
greater part written in Sanskrit, although that language, 
probably never the vernacular of the whole country, 
ceased to be spoken at an early date ; and so, since none 
of the dramatic compositions at present known can claim 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 311 


a very high antiquity, “they must have been unintelligible 
to a considerable part of their audiences, and never could 
have been so directly addressed to the bulk of the 
population as to have exercised much influence on their 
passions or tastes.” This, however, as Professor Wilson 
himself adds, is perfectly in harmony with Hindu social 
life, in which the highest branches of literature as well as 
the highest offices in the State were reserved for the 
Brahmans and Kshattriyas ; and, though the sacred 
character of the representation, as well as of the Sanskrit 
language itself, is regarded by Wilson as a poor substitute 
for really popular interest, we must not forget that such 
dramatic spectacles required considerable relaxation of 
Brahmanic exclusiveness, that the diversities of spoken 
dialects would have given a local tone to any drama 
employing one of these dialects, and that the pedantry 
of Latin plays like those of Ariosto (with which the 
Indian have been compared) offends, not so much as an 
affectation of scholarship, but rather as the wilful prefer- 
ence of a dead language to a polished national speech. 
Had India possessed any national speech, we might be 
justified in comparing her drama with the Latin plays of 
modern Europe ; but, in the absence of uniform speech, 
it is not easy to see how a drama could have been pro- 
duced without the aid of some such instrument as 
Sanskrit. Dramas in the vernacular dialects and of an 
inferior character have, indeed, left traces of their exist- 
ence “ in the dramatised stories of the Bhanrs, or pro- 
fessional buffoons, in the Jdtras of the Bengalis, and the 
Rasas of the western provinces.” Of these, the first are 
representations “ of some ludieious adventure by two or 
three performers, carried on in extempore dialogue usually 
of a very coarse kind, and enlivened by practical jokes 
not always very decent. The Jdtra is generally the 


312 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


exhibition of some of the incidents in the youthful life 
of Krishna, maintained also in extempore dialogue, but 
interspersed with popular songs. The Rasa, partakes 
more of the ballet, but it is accompanied also with songs, 
while the adventures of Krishna or Kama are represented 
in appropriate costume by measured gesticulation.” A 
theatre really worthy of the name needed the dignity of 
that language which contained the treasures of India’s 
lyric and epic poetry and wore a look of permanence and 
universality to which none of the spoken dialects could 
pretend. 

The Sanskrit dramas, like those of Athens, are 
primarily written for but one specific performance, which, 
since their length often extends to as many as ten acts, 
must have occupied, not the two hours’ traffic of the 
Shaksperian stage, but probably from five to six hours. 
Resembling the Athenian in their sacred character and 
not written, like the plays of modern Europe, for permanent 
theatrical companies with their professional ends, these 
dramas seem to have been acted only on solemn occasions 
which may be compared with the spring and autumn 
festivals of Bacchus in the Athenian theatre. “Accord- 
ing to Hindu authorities,” says Wilson, “the occasions 
suitable for dramatic representations are the lunar 
holidays, a royal coronation, assemblages of people at 
fairs and religious festivals, marriages, the meeting of 
friends, taking first possession of a house or a town, and 
the birth of a son ; the most ordinary occasion, however, 
was the season peculiarly sacred to some divinity.” 
While this association of the Indian drama with sacred 
festivals may remind us of our European miracle-plays, 
or the Persian tazyas, or passion-plays, represented in the 
first ten days of the month Moharrem, as described by 
Count Gobineau, the infrequency of the Indian spectacle, 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 313 


together with the use of Sanskrit, will guard us against 
the error of Sir William Jones, who supposed that “the 
Indian theatre would fill as many volumes as that of 
any nation in ancient or modern Europe.” While the 
list of dramatic pieces composed by Chinese dramatists 
of the Youen dynasty reac*hes a total of five hundred 
and sixty-four, it is doubtful whether all the Sanskrit 
plays to be found, together with those mentioned by 
writers on the drama, amount to more than sixty. Only 
three plays are attributed to each of the great Indian 
dramatists, Bhavabhuti and Kalidasa — a number to be 
contrasted not merely with the two hundred and sixty 
comedies attributed to Antiphanes or the two thousand 
plays of Lope de Vega, but with the substantial dramatic 
contributions of Aristophanes, Plautus, or Shakspere. 
But, though the number of Indian plays is small, they 
supplied, in the decay of dramatic art, a rich field for 
that verbal criticism in which Oriental intellect delights. 
System-mongers, taking the place of dramatic poets, 
laid down a technique and dogmatical precepts, and “ set 
themselves to classify plays, persons, and passions until 
they wove a complicated web out of very spider-like 
materials.” Seeking no initiation in the mysteries of this 
criticism, we shall now turn to the main characteristics 
already noticed as common to the Indian epics and the 
Indian drama — the prominence of physical Nature and 
the disregard of “ the unities.” 

§ 89. Although the prominence of Nature in the 
Indian drama is by no means to be estimated solely from 
descriptive passages, the constant use of similes and 
figures taken from Nature’s life really supplying more 
convincing evidences of this prominence than any number 
of such passages, it is easier to select some of the latter 
than to give the reader any idea of that perfect mosaic of 


314 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Nature-language which these dramas contain. Perhaps, 
however, the following translation of Maitreya’s observa- 
tions in the fourth act of MrichcliJiakati , or the “ Toy- 
cart,” may convey some impression of this Nature- 
language, while two passages from the fifth act of the 
same play will illustrate the descriptions of Nature with 
which Indian plays abound. The translations, it must 
be added, are the work of that profound and elegant 
scholar, the late Professor Horace Hay man Wilson, to 
whom all Sanskrit students are so deeply indebted, and 
whose words have already been frequently quoted. 

“ A very pretty entrance,” says Maitreya ; “ the 
threshold is neatly coloured, well swept and watered ; the 
floor is beautified with strings of sweet flowers ; the top 
of the gate is lofty, and gives one the pleasure of looking 
up to the clouds, while the jasmine festoon hangs 
tremblingly down, as if it were now tossing on the trunk 
of Indra’s elephant. Over the doorway is a lofty arch of 
ivory; above it again wave flags dyed with safflower, 
their fringes curling in the wind like fingers that beckon 
me 4 come hither/ . . . Bless me ! why, here is a line of 
palaces, as white as the moon, as the conch, as the stalk 
of the water-lily. Oh, ho ! this is a very gay scene : here 
the drums, beaten by tapering fingers, emit like clouds a 
murmuring tone; there the cymbals, beating time, flash 
as they descend like the unlucky stars that fall from 
heaven. The flute here breathes the soft hum of the 
bee ; some damsels are singing like so many bees intoxi- 
cated with flowery nectar; others are practising the 
graceful dance, and others are employed in reading plays 
and poems. . . . The arched gateway is of gold, and many- 
coloured gems on a ground of sapphire, and looks like 
the bow of Indra in an azure sky. ... A very lovely scene ! 
The numerous trees are bowed down by delicious fruit. 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 315 


and between them are silken swings constructed for the 
light form of youthful beauty ; the yellow jasmine, the 
graceful mdlati, the full-blossomed mcilliJcd, the blue 
clitoria, spontaneous shed their flowers and strew the 
ground with a carpet more lovely than any in the groves 
of Inclra ; the reservoir glows with the red lotus-blossoms, 
like the dawn with the fiery beams of the rising sun; 
and here the asoJcct tree, with its rich crimson blossoms, 
shines like a young warrior bathed in the sanguine 
shower of the furious fight.” 

The fifth act of the same play opens with the follow- 
ing speech of Charudatta : — 

“ A heavy storm impends ; the gathering gloom 
Delights the peafowl and distracts the swan 
Not yet prepared for periodic flight; 

And these deep shades contract with sad despondence 
The heart that pines in absence. Through the air, 

A rival Kesava* the purple cloud 
Rolls stately on, girded by golden lightning 
As by his yellow garb, and bearing high 
The long white line of storks. . . . 

From the dark womb in rapid fall descend 
The silvery drops, and glittering in the gleams 
Shot from the lightning, bright and fitful, sparkle 
Like a rich fringe rent from the robe of heaven ; 

The firmament is filled with scattered clouds, 

And, as they fly before the wind, their forms, 

As in a picture, image various shapes, 

The semblances of storks and soaring swans, 

Of dolphins and the monsters of the deep, 

Of dragons vast and pinnacles and towers.” 


* Crinifus, a name of Krishna, perhaps alluding to his graceful tresses, 
as Professor Wilson notes. Although descriptive passages such as the 
above and following are strictly without parallel in the Shaksperian 
drama, the student of Shakspere will be reminded of the lines in Antony 
and Cleopatra (Act. IV. sc. xii.) ; — 

“Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish: 

A vapour, sometime, like a bear, or lion, 

A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock, 

A forked mountain, or blue promontory 
With trees upon ’t, that nod unto the world. 

And mock our eyes with, air : thou hast seen these signs ; 

They are black vesper’s pageants.” 


316 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Then follow lines peculiarly interesting for their 
allusions to the story and persons of the epic Mahabharata; 
the Dhritarashtra mentioned here has above been already 
referred to in our notice of the epic, while Duryodhan is 
one of the Kauravas, and Yudhishthira the eldest son of 
Pandu. Charudatta continues : — 

“ The spreading shade, methinks, is like the host 
Of Dhritarashtra shoutiug loud in thunder ; 

Yon strutting peacock welcomes its advance 
Like proud Duryodhan vaunting of his might; 

From its dread enmity the loll flies 
lake luckless Yudhishthira by the dice 
Bereaved of power ; and scatter wild the swans 
Like the proscribed and houseless Pamlavas.” 

In the same act of the “ Toy-cart ” occurs a famous 
description of the rainy season in a dialogue between 
Vasantasena, the Vita, and an attendant. The Vita, it 
must be added, like the Vidushaha, or Buffoon, is a stock- 
character of the Hindu theatre ; this personage must be 
accomplished in poetry, music, singing, may be the 
companion of a man or a woman, is on familiar terms 
with his associate, and may be compared with the Parasite 
of the Greek and Latin plays. The passage is here 
quoted at length as one of the best specimens of Natural 
description in the Indian drama. 

“ Atten. Lady, upon the mountain’s brow the clouds 
Hang dark and drooping, as the aching heart 
Of her who sorrows for her distant lord ; 

Their thunders rouse the peafowl, and the sky 
Is agitated by their wings, as fanned 
By thousand fans with costly gems enclosed. 

The chattering frog quaffs the pellucid drops 
That cleanse his miry jaws ; the peahen shrieks 
With transport, and the Nipa freshly blooms. 

The moon is blotted by the driving scud, 

As is the saintly character by thoso 
Who wear its garb to veil their abject lives; 

And, like the damsel whose fair fame is lost 
In ever-changing loves, the lightning, true 
To no one quarter, flits along the skies. 

Vas. You speak it well, my friend ; . . . 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 317 


Let the clouds fall in torrents, thunder roar, 

And heaven’s red bolt dash fiercely to the ground, 

The dauntless damsel faithful love inspires 
Treads boldly on, nor dreads the maddening storm. 

Vita. Like an invading prince, who holds his court 
Within the city of his humbled foe, 

Yon mighty cloud, advancing with the wind, 

With store of arrowy shower, with thundering drums, 

And blazing streamers, marches to assail 
In his own heavens the monarch of the night. 

Fas. Nay, nay, not so ; I rather read it thus; — 

The clouds that, like unwieldy elephants, 

Roll their inflated masses grumbling on, 

Or whiten with the migratory troop 
Of hovering cranes, teach anguish to the heart. 

The storks’ shrill cry sounds like the plaintive tabor 
To her who muses on her lord’s return. 

Vita. Behold, where yonder ponderous cloud assumes 
The stature of the elephant, the storks 
Entwine a fillet for his front, and waves 
The lightning like a chouri o’er his head. 

Vas. Observe, my friend, the day is swallowed up 
By these deep shades, dark as the dripping leaf 
Of the tciurdla tree, and, like an elephant 
That cowering shuns the battle's arrowy sleet, 

So shrinks the scattering ant-hill from the shower. . . . 

In sooth, I think the firmament dissolves: 

Melted by India’s scorching bolt, it falls 
In unexhausted torrents. Now the cloud 
Ascends — now stoops — now roars aloud in thunder — 

Now sheds its streams — now frowns with deeper gloom, 

Full of fantastic change, like one new-raised 
By fortune’s fickle favours. 

Vita. Now the sky 

With lightning flames, now laughs with whitening storks, 

Now glows with Indra’s painted bow that hurls 
Its hundred shafts — now rattles with his bolt — 

Now loud it chafes with rushing winds, and now, 

With clustering clouds that roll their spiry folds 
Like sable snakes along, it thickens dark 
As if ’twere clothed with vapours such as spread 
When incense soars in circling wreaths to heaven.” 

To exhaust such descriptive passages, even in such 
Indian plays as have been translated into European lan- 
guages, would be a long and rather monotonous task. At 
the end of Act V. in this same play two similar descrip- 
tive passages are put into the mouth of Charudatta. In 
Vihrama and Urvasi (or “ The Hero and the Nymph ”), 


318 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


attributed to Kalidasa, the first act opens on the Hima- 
layan Mountains, and, a troop of Apsarasas, or nymphs of 
heaven, entering, the opportunity for such passages may 
be readily conceived. As a brief specimen from this play, 
we may select the closing words of the second act spoken 
by King Paruravas : — 

“ ’Tis past raid-day. Exhausted by the heat, 

The peacock plunges in the scanty pool 
That feeds the tall tree’s root ; the drowsy bee 
Sleeps in the hollow chambers of the lotus 
Darkened with closing petals ; on the brink 
Of the now tepid lake the wild duck lurks 
Among the sedgy shade ; and even here 
The parrot from his wiry bower complains, 

And calls for water to allay his thirst.” 

In the third act of the same play a description of the 
rising moon is put into the mouth of Paruravas ; and in 
the fourth act, the scene of which lies in the forest of 
Akalusha, the lyrical descriptions of Nature are too 
numerous to admit of easy illustration. From other 
plays examples of natural description might readily be 
collected, such as the lines of Vasanti, beginning, “ The 
sun, with glow intense,” etc., in the second act of the 
Ultara-Rama-Charitra , the scene of which is the forest of 
Janasthana, along the river Godaveri. But, instead of 
uselessly multiplying examples from these and other 
Indian plays, we shall turn aside to observe a similar 
prominence of Nature in the Chinese and Japanese 
dramas. 

§ 84. If the Hindu critic attributes the legendary 
origin of his drama to an inspired sage, Bharata, or even 
to the god Brahma, the less ambitious Celestial is content 
to refer the origin of his theatre to the Emperor Hiouen- 
tsong, of the T’ang dynasty, founder of an Imperial 
Academy of Music and of the Chinese drama (cir. 
736 a.d.). Among the Chinese neither music nor litera- 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 319 


ture was destined to be monopolised by a caste of priests ; 
and this difference in social development lias left its marks 
in certain differences of the Chinese and Indian dramas. 
The prologue of the Indian play, Mdlati and Madkava , 
shows how the Indian dramatist, addressing himself to 
a cultured audience acquainted with Sanskrit, valued 
artistic qualities such as fertility of imagination, harmony 
of style, diversity of incident. But the purpose of the 
Chinese drama is not artistic but moral ; it is “ to present 
the noblest teachings of history to the ignorant who 
cannot read;” “to present upon the stage,” as the Chinese 
penal code puts it, “real or fictitious pictures of just 
and good men, chaste women, affectionate and obedient 
children, which may lead the spectators to the practice 
of virtue.” In the Pi-pa-ki (or “ History of a Lute ”), 
a Chinese drama in twenty-four scenes represented at 
Peking in 1404 A.D., there are indeed some signs of 
artistic criticism — variety of incidents and greater indi- 
viduality of character, for example ; but the Youen Col- 
lection of Chinese plays, an anthology which belongs to 
the thirteenth century, altogether subordinates art to 
didactic moralising. So important, indeed, is this didactic 
purpose that it has produced a feature of the Chinese 
drama not to be found in any other theatre of the East 
or West — the singing personage. “In all Chinese plays,” 
says Sir John Davis,* “ there is an irregular operatic 
species of song which the principal character occasionally 
chants forth in unison, with a loud or soft accompaniment 
of music as may best suit the sentiment or action of the 
moment.” “It was not enough for the Chinese,” says 
M. Bazin,f “to have laid down moral utility as the end 
of their dramatic representations; they must also discover 

* Introduction to the Sorrows of Han. 

f Theatre Chinois , Introduction, p. xxx. 


320 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the means of attaining that end. Hence the role of the 
singing personage, an admirably ingenious conception, 
a characteristic essentially distinguishing the Chinese 
from all known theatres. This singing personage, with 
figurative, showy, and lyrical diction, his voice aided by 
a musical accompaniment, is a link between the poet and 
the audience, like the chorus of the Greek theatre, only 
with this difference, that he remains no stranger to the 
action. On the contrary, the singing personage is the 
hero of the piece, who, when the catastrophe occurs, 
always remains on the stage to rouse the sorrow of the 
spectators and draw forth their tears. It will be observed 
that this personage, like the rest, may be taken from 
any class of social life; in the Sorrows of Han he is 
an emperor ; in the Maid's Intrigues , a young servant. 
When the chief personage dies in the course of the play, 
his place is taken by another character of the drama, who 
sings in his turn. In fact, the singing personage is the 
leading character that instructs, cites the maxims of the 
wise, the precepts of philosophers, or appeals to famous 
examples from history or mythology.” 

The passages in which descriptions of Nature, or 
figures taken from the sights and sounds of Nature’s 
life, occur most frequently are sung by this curious 
personage ; it is to be remembered, however, that, as in 
the Indian drama, the prominence of Nature is marked 
quite as much by the use of similes as by actual de- 
scriptions. Such a simile, for example, is contained in 
the very name of the play, Han-lcoong-tseu } literally, 
“ Autumn in the Palace of Ilan ” — a name translated the 
“ Sorrow's of Han,” because in Chinese “ Autumn ” is 
emblematic of sorrow, just as “Spring” is of joy. 
Throughout this play, the subject of which is the tragic 
fate of a Chinese lady, who throws herself into the river 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 321 


Amoor rather than wed the Khan of the Tartars, there 
breathes an air of autumn delicately in keeping with the 
simile from Nature just observed in the name. The 
prominence of Nature in the Chinese drama may indeed 
be readily conceived from the fact that Chinese critics, 
dividing the subjects of dramatic composition into twelve 
classes, specify as the second and ninth of these classes, 
“ Woods, springs, hills, and valleys,” and “ The wind, the 
llowers, the snow, the moon.” A few illustrations may be 
selected from the plays of the Youen Collection trans- 
lated by M. Bazin.* 

In Tcliao-mei-hian(j (“ A Maid’s Intrigues ”) the follow- 
ing words, partly sung, partly spoken, are put into the 
mouth of one of the female characters. “ With gentle 
sound our gemmed sashes wave in the wind ; how softly 
trip our little feet like golden creepers o’er the grass ! 
Above, the moon shines brightly as we tread the dark green 
moss. . . . Lady, see, how crimson are the flowers; they 
show like pieces of embroidered silk. Look on the green 

* The Chinese drama is at present known to European readers 
chiefly through the translations of Sir J. F. Davis, M. Stanislas Julien, 
and M. Bazin, made from the Youen-jin-pe-tchong , or “ Hundred Plays 
composed under the Youen,” princes of Genghis-Khan’s famous family. 
Earliest among European translations from this dramatic anthology came 
the Orphan of the Tchao Family, made in 1731 by Father Premare, a 
Jesuit missionary, and published in 1735. Voltaire, twenty years later, 
adapted the subject of this Chinese play to the French stage ; but three 
quarters of a century were to elapse before European scholars manifested 
any zealous interest in the theatre of China. At length the Heir in Old 
Age and the Sorrows of Ban were translated by Sir J. F. Davis ; and, in 
1832, the History of the Chalk Circle , and (in 1834) a new and full trans- 
lation of the Orphan of the Tchao Family, were added by M. Julien. But 
not till 1838 was any considerable knowledge of this Eastern drama placed 
within reach of European readers. In that year M. Bazin published 
his Chinese Theatre , which not only contained lour plays never before 
translated, but was accompanied by an excellent preface, describing the 
general character of the Chinese stage under the Youen dynasty. In 
1841 M. Bazin put students of Chinese literature under new obliga- 
tions by publishing his translation of the Pi-pa-ki. The study of the 
Chinese drama in Europe does not, however, seem to have made any 
farther progress. 


322 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


hues of the willows — afar one might have thought them 
clouds of mist all balanced in the air. . . . The flowers 
and willows seem to sigh at our approach ; the breeze, 
the moon, are fuller still of sympathy; ’tis they that 
bring to life the varied colours that we love. A poet in 
such moments of delight might feel constrained to pour 
out in sweet verse the feelings of his soul. No han-lin 
by his talent could describe the charms of this fair scene, 
no painter with rich colours represent them. . . . The 
perfumed plants are veiled in floating mist ; our lamp 
throws a still flame within its covering of blue gauze; 
yonder the willows like green silks are hanging, from 
whence drip pearls of dew, and fall, like rain of stars, 
into the limpid pool — gems, one might call them, softly 
dropped within a crystal basin. And, look, the rising 
moon shines at the willow’s edge, like that sky-coloured 
dragon who of old carried the mirror of Hoang-ti” 

Other examples of the sentiment of Nature in the 
same play might be quoted ; for example, in the third 
act Fan-sou sings, “ The moon is silvery, the breeze 
fresh, and the flowers spread out thick clouds of perfume 
— the moon floats on the water’s face ; with gentle breeze 
the willows wave, and veiled in summer mists the palace 
lies.” But we prefer to vary our examples. In the 
next play translated by M. Bazin, Ho-han-chan , or “ The 
Tunic compared,” Tchang-i, the Youen-wai (a title of mer- 
chants and proprietors), watching from within his house 
(known by the sign of the Golden Lion) a fall of snow, 
partly speaks, partly sings, as follows : “ My son, *tis 
true the flakes of icy snow are very beautiful. Clouds 
that look like reddish mists stretchout and mass together 
from all sides ; big snow-Hakes whirl and eddy in the air ; 
the north wind blows with fury, and the view loses itself 
in a silvery horizon. . . . Now are we just at the season 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 323 

when the cold begins, and go you say the winter comes ; 
but as for me I say it is the spring ; if it were otherwise, 
how could these pear-blossoms be tumbling leaf by leaf? 
How could the willow-blossoms fly in whirls ? The 
blossoms of the pear-tree crowd together and make a 
silvered ground ; the blossoms of the willow lift them- 
selves skywards like to a waving dress and fall again to 
earth.” * 

Beside this highly imaginative description of the 
falling snow, we may place the character of the deceitful 
courtesan drawn in Ho-lang-tan , or the “ Singing Girl,” 
a play detailing the ruin of a Chinese family by a 
courtesan, and excellently illustrating that inculcation of 
family virtues to which we shall presently advert as one 
of the striking characteristics of the Chinese drama. 
“ You love,” says the matron Lieou-chi to her husband, 
who has determined to make a second wife of Tchang-iu- 
ngo the courtesan, “ you love those looks in which the 
streams of autumn seem to play ; f you worship those 
eyebrows painted and delicately arched. But know you 
not that you ruin your character? Bethink yon that 
this forehead, wearing the splendour of the Fou-yong 
flower, brings ruin upon households ; that this mouth, 
with its carnation-hues of peach and cherry, devours 
the souls of men. Her perfumed breath exhales the 
odours of the clove tree ; but much I fear that all her 

* The second act of the same play contains some lines which remind 
us of Pope’s famous simile, so much admired by Johnson, ending — 

“Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.” 

Tchang-i, in pursuit of his son, sings, “My outlook darkens more and 
more. The river here is deep, the mountain-heights vanish among the 
clouds ; e’en so, among my grievous sorrows, I am checked by watery 
wastes and by that limited horizon which robs me of all view.” 

t The lustre of beautiful eyes is compared by Chinese novelists to 
“ the pure Avaters of a fountain in autumn, over which there floats a 
willow-leaf.” 


15 


324 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


flowers shall scatter, and a whirl of wind bear them 
away.” 

Again, the opening verses of Teou-ngo-youen , recited 
by the lady Tsai', remind us of those in which so many 
poets, from Homer to Menander, from Theocritus to 
Lamartine, have expressed the contrast of Nature’s ever- 
lasting life with man’s individual decay and death — a 
contrast in which the origin of the pastoral elegy of 
Bion and Moschus, imitated by English poets, from Milton 
in his Lycidas to Matthew Arnold in his TJiyrsis , is to 
be truly found. The Chinese verses run thus: “We 
watch the flowers spring ever forth afresh — but man 
grows young again like them no more. What need to 
hasten after wealth and rank ? Best and rejoicing are 
the immortals’ lot.” The central scene of this play offers 
a peculiar evidence of the close relations conceived by 
Chinese mind to exist between human justice and the 
physical forces of Nature. Teou-ngo, condemned to 
death by a corrupt judge,* is about to be executed on 
the stage ; she forewarns the court of the prodigies which 
are to prove her innocence, and which remind us of the 
fire that fell on the prophet’s sacrifice, and the three 
years’ drought that came on Israel. “ My lord, we still 
are in that season of the year when painfully men bear 
excessive heat. ’Tis well ! If I be innocent, then shall 
the heaven let fall, when I shall cease to live, thick 
flakes of chilling snow to cover o’er the body of Teou-ngo. 
. . . Know you why, of old, three years was blessed rain 
kept from the earth? Because the district of Tong-hai 
had incurred the just revenge of a woman filled with 
filial piety. Now it is the turn of your district of Chan- 

* The Chinese drama was evidently used occasionally as a vehicle 
of satire. In the Chalk Circle an unjust judge* is also satirized; and 
iu the Pi-pa-ki there is an entire scene parodying the Chinese Official 
Examinations. 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 325 


yang. All this comes from the magistrates abandoning 
justice and humanity. . . . Clouds that float in the air 
for me, darken the sky! Winds that murmur and moan 
for me, whirl down in tempest ! ” Snow in the heats 
of summer and a three years’ drought attest the innocence 
of the unjustly executed Teou-ngo ; and if for the epic 
poet of England the seasons change at the sin of Adam, 
for the Chinese dramatist they change at the condemna- 
tion of the innocent. 

Many other examples of this prominence of Nature 
in the Chinese drama might be cited — for example, the 
description of the Yellow Kiver in the first act of 
Si-siang-ki, translated by M. Stanislas Julien; but we 
shall prefer to observe the same feature in the lyrical 
drama of Japan. The characters and names of the 
Japanese plays translated by Mr. Chamberlain, in his 
Classical Poetry of the Japanese , show want of indi- 
vidual characterisation, and predominence of allegorical 
or abstract idea3 and natural description. In the Rohe 
of Feathers the dramatis personas are a fairy, a fisherman, 
and the chorus ; in Life is a Dream (an allegorical piece 
suggestive of Calderon’s autos sacramentales) and the 
Deathstone individuality is likewise wanting. Here, 
however, we are only concerned with the prominence of 
Nature in these plays ; it may be illustrated by an outline 
of the Rohe of Feathers, as translated by Mr. Chamberlain. 
The play opens with a long recitative, in which the 
fisherman and chorus describe the beauties of Miho’s 
pine- clad shore at dawn on a spring morning. The 
fisherman steps on shore and the action of the piece 
begins. ‘‘As I land on Miho’s shore,” says the fisher- 
man, “flowers come fluttering down, strains of music 
re-echo, and a more than earthly fragrance fills the air. 
Surely there is something in this.” Suddenly he sees 


326 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


a fairy robe hanging from the branches of a pine tree, 
and determines to take it back with him to the old folks 
in his village. Bat now the fairy owner of the robe 
claims it — without her robe of feathers “ never more can 
she go through the realms of air, never return to her 
celestial home.” The fisherman refuses to restore the 
robe; and a situation arises reminding us somewhat of 
Philoctetes and Neoptolemus in the drama of Sophocles. 
The chorus pity her, and sing, in a spirit full of natural 
sentiment — 

“ Clouds, wandering clouds, she yearns and yearns in vain, 

Soaring like you to tread the heaven agaiu.” 

Presently the fisherman relents. On one condition he 
will restore the robe — that the fairy shall dance one of 
the fairy dances of which he has heard so much. The 
fairy consents to dance “ the dance that makes the Palace 
of the Moon turn round,” and, singing 

“Now the dancing maiden sings, 

Robed in clouds and fleecy wings,” 

commences one of those dances which occupy so prominent 
a place in the Japanese drama. Meanwhile the chorus 
sings of the cause that “ gave the blue realms of air their 
name of firmament,” the fairy now and then joining in 
their song. The fairy continues dancing to the end of 
the play, the chorus in imagination watching and de- 
scribing her disappearance from their sight towards 
heaven in the following ode, which well deserves a place 
alongside the descriptive passages of the Indian and 
Chinese dramas. 

“Dance on, sweet maiden, through the happy hours; 

Dance on, sweet maiden, while the magic flowers 
Crowning thy tresses flutter in the wind, 

Raised by the waving pinions intertwined. . . . 

But, ah, the hour, the hour of parting rings ! 

Caught by the breeze the fairy’s magic wings 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 327 


Heavenward do bear her from the pine-clad shore, 

Past Ukishfma’s widely stretching moor, 

Past Ashidaka’s heights, and where are spread 
Th’ eternal snows on Fusiyama’s head — 

Higher and higher to the azure skies, 

Till wandering vapours hide her from our eyes.” 

It is to be noted how strongly this prominence of 
Nature distinguishes the Oriental from the Western 
dramas. The scene of iEschylus’ Prometheus Bound lies on 
the Caucasus, in the midst of that savagely sublime scenery 
which Lermontoff, the Kussian Byron, was to depict in 
his Demon; but the Athenian dramatist makes no use 
of the opportunity for description, his own interest and 
that of his audience being centred on humanity, not 
physical Nature — a striking contrast to Shelley’s Pro- 
metheus Unbound, in which we have humanity subordinated 
to Nature. Again, in the Persians how an Indian 
dramatist would have delighted in giving a full and 
graphic description of the Hellespont; in Sophocles’ 
Philoctetes and CEdipus at Colonus, how widely would he 
have extended the brief notice of the hero’s cavern and 
of the sacred grove ! Nor is this domination of human 
interest by any means confined to the classical drama of 
the West. Beyond the description of the starry night 
in the Merchant of Venice, and a few glimpses of Nature 
such as that of the sea in Lear, we shall find few passages 
descriptive of Nature in Shakspere’s plays, and not many 
more in the plays of his contemporary dramatists. More- 
over, the mysteries and miracle-plays of England, France, 
and Germany are curiously deficient in description of 
Nature. The same characteristic is presented by German 
dramatists, who can by no means be accused of slavishly 
following Greek models. Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, for 
example, though elaborated from ideas first roused in 
the mind of the poet’s friend Goethe by Swiss scenery, 


328 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


confines description to the scenic notices at the com- 
mencement of each scene — notices which an Indian 
dramatist would certainly have worked out as poetry in 
the body of the play, expending, too, his highest art on 
these very parts which the Western dramatist cannot 
allow into his drama at all. If we are asked the causes 
of this marked difference between the dramas of the 
East and those of the West, we shall be content to name 
the absence of individuality in the former contrasted 
with the latter — weak character-drawing being thus sup- 
plemented by natural description — and the prominence 
of town-life in the Western contrasted with that of the 
village and country in the Eastern civilisation ; but to 
answer the question at all fully would carry us far beyond 
the limits of the present work. 

§ 85. Closely connected with this prevalence of 
natural description is a vivid realisation of sights and 
sounds likewise common to the Indian and Chinese 
theatres. In the Indian play Mrichchhalcati, for example, 
the following graphic speech is put into the mouth of 
Karnapuraka. “ Only hear. Your ladyship’s fierce 
elephant ‘Post-breaker’ killed his keeper and broke his 
chain; he then scoured off along the high-road, making 
a terrible confusion. The people shouted and screamed, 
‘ Carry off the children, get up the trees, climb the 
walls ; the elephant is coming ! ’ Away went girdles and 
anklets ; and pearls and diamonds were scattered about 
in all directions. There he was, plunging about in 
Ujjayin, and tearing everything to pieces with his trunk, 
his feet, and his tusks, as if the city had been a large 
tank full of lotus-flowers.” Again, every reader of Sa- 
huntald will remember the graphic description with which 
that play opens. After the Brahman has pronounced the 
usual benediction, and the actress, at the manager’s 


W OKLD-LITER ATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 329 


request, has sung “ the charming strain,” the play opens 
with the forest scene. King Dushmanta, in a chariot, is 
pursuing an antelope with bow and quiver. “ The fleet 
creature,” says the king to his charioteer, “ has given us 
a long chase. Oh! there he runs, with his neck bent 
gracefully, looking back now and then at the pursuing 
chariot. Now, through fear of a descending shaft, he 
contracts his forehand and extends his flexible haunches ; 
and now, through fatigue, he pauses to nibble the grass 
in his path with half-opened mouth. See, how he springs 
and bounds with long steps, lightly skimming the ground 
and rising high in the air.” At the king’s order the 
reins are loosened and the chariot driven over the stage, 
first at full gallop and then gently, the charioteer and 
the king making speeches descriptive of their rapid 
imaginary course. “ The horses,” says the former, “ were 
not even touched by the clouds of dust which they 
raised ; they tossed their manes, erected their ears, and 
rather glided than galloped over the smooth plain.” 
“ Soon,” responds Dushmanta, “ they outran the swift 
antelope. Objects which, from their distance, appeared 
minute, presently became larger; what was really divided 
seemed united as we passed, and what was in truth bent 
seemed straight ; so swift was the motion of the wheels 
that nothing for many moments was either distant or 
near.” If space permitted, it might be shown that the 
Chinese dramatists possess a like talent for graphic 
description ; but we shall prefer to illustrate that neglect 
of the unities which we have already observed as a 
common characteristic of Indian epic and dramatic 
poetry, and which in the Chinese drama is no less 
marked. 

To illustrate the Indian disregard of the temporal 
unity — in the Toy-cart the time of action is four days ; in 


330 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the Ratnavali, the same ; in the Malati and Madhava, a 
few days; and in the Uttara-Rama-Charitra , though the 
time of each act is that of its representation, an interval 
of twelve years occurs between the first act and the re- 
mainder of the play. The violations of the temporal 
unity in the Chinese drama are much greater, and that 
for a special reason. Here didactic purposes have made 
the dramatist peculiarly fond of historical personages and 
events ; and it is almost needless to say that wherever 
any form of the historical drama, religious or secular, has 
prevailed, the temporal unity has been neglected. Thus, 
in Ho-lian-chan, eighteen years elapse between the second 
and third acts, the unborn infant of the former having 
become the young hunter, Tchin-pao, of the latter ; in IIo- 
lang-tan , the third act opens with the words of Youan- 
yen, “Alas, the days and months glide away with the 
speed of the arrow,” for thirteen years have elapsed since 
the purchase of the child formally detailed in the second 
act ; and, in Teou-ngo-tjouen, the father of Teou-ngo says, 
“ ’Tis now full sixteen years since I left my daughter ” — 
the event dramatised in the first act. Far from anv 
apologies such as the chorus in Winter's Tale and in 
Henry V. offers, the Chinese dramatist does not even see 
the need of always recollecting the lapse of time. In 
llo-lian-clian, for example, when the old couple are again 
brought upon the stage (Act. III. sc. vi.), eighteen years 
have not accustomed them to beggars’ habits. Tchang-i 
is still lamenting his losses as if they had happened but 
yesterday; both he and his wife are still mendicants 
fresh at the trade, feeling bitterly “ the disgrace of ask- 
ing alms in the street ; ” nay, even the snow-flakes are 
still falling and the winds still roaring as on the dismal 
day of the conflagration in which he lost his wealth. 

Unity of place is equally disregarded by Indian and 


W ORLD-LITER ATUKE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 331 


Chinese dramatists. The vast range of Indian and 
Chinese life, contrasted with the petty circle of the Greek 
city commonwealth, prevented fixity of place from being 
attended to. Thus, to take some Indian examples, in 
Vikramorvasi the scene of the first act is on the peaks of 
the Himalayan Mountains, that of the second and third 
the palace of Paruravas, that of the fourth the forest of 
Akalusha, while the fifth shifts again to the palace. So 
in the Uttara-Rama-Charitra the scene of the first act 
is in the palace of Kama at Ayodhya, that of the second 
act in the forest of Janasthana along the Godaveri, while 
in the rest of the piece the scene lies in the vicinity of 
Valmiki’s hermitage at Bithiir, on the Ganges. To select 
some Chinese examples, the scenes of the Sorrows oj 
Han shift from the palace of the emperor to the Tartar 
encampment and the banks of the Amoor ; those of Ho - 
lian-clian from the Sign of the Golden Lion to the 
Yellow Kiver, thence to the house of the brigand Tchin- 
hou, next to the monastery of Fo, to the pagoda of the 
Golden Sand, to the valley of Ouo-kong, finally again to 
the pagoda; and those of Pi-pa-ki constantly change 
from the capital to the native village of the family whose 
fortunes form the subject of the piece. 

§ 86. But if there are striking resemblances in the 
Indian and Chinese theatres, such as natural description 
and the neglect of the unities, there are differences no 
less striking. We have already referred to the singing 
personage of the Chinese drama and the didactic purposes 
to which this character, and indeed the entire play, is 
applied ; and we have contrasted this didactic moralising 
with the artistic aims of the Indian theatre. This 
didactic purpose of the Chinese drama tends to prevent 
profound analysis of individual character and to con- 
centrate attention on the incidents of the story. But 


332 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


there is another and far deeper reason for want of in- 
dividuality in Chinese plays — the family system upon 
which the social life of China rests. It might even 
seem at first glance that the Chinese, like the early 
Roman, family should have been fatal to the rise of any 
drama of character. But the old Roman familia, with 
its patria potestas , children under power, perpetual 
tutelage of women, presented for a long time more serious 
obstacles to the development of personal freedom and 
individuality of character than the Chinese system, 
modified as it was by the principle of election to public 
offices as well as by State examination. But, though 
the Chinese family did not prevent the rise of a drama, 
it has certainly left its marks deep on almost all Chinese 
plays. Such marks are to be seen in the constant in- 
junction of family virtues and the limitation of character- 
drawing to the virtues or vices of family life. To select 
a few examples, the plot of Tchao-mei-hiang turns upon 
the proper celebration of marriage rites ; that of Ho-han- 
chan upon the fortunes of a family wrecked by an un- 
grateful impostor ; that of Ho-lang-tan upon the ruin of 
a family by the intrigues of a courtesan ; that of Pi-pa-hi 
upon the filial devotion of a daughter-in-law in days 
of famine. Indeed, so perpetually are we reminded of 
the formal and spiritual presence of the family in Chinese 
plays, that the dramatis personas are always careful to 
announce the name of the family to which they belong. 
One effect of the Chinese family upon the drama deserves 
particular attention. The ancestral worship of the 
family, in which the representation of deceased ances- 
tors by living persons was itself an infant drama, seems 
to have materialised and familiarised the associations 
of the spiritual world to a degree we can but faintly 
realise. The Kouei-men (“ Ghosts’ Gate ”) of the Chinese 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 333 


stage — the door through which the ghosts make their 
entrances and exits — marks the frequent presence of 
spiritual (but by no means immaterial) personages in the 
theatre; even amusing parodies on ancestral worship 
might be quoted — for example, from Act IV. sc. vi. of 
Ho-lian-chan. Indeed, the Chinese dramatist displays an 
easy familiarity with the world of spirits worthy of the 
roughest maker of medieval mysteries. The Bevenge of 
Teou-ngo , for example, is a drama in which ghost-life — - 
if we may use such a phrase — is denuded of all that 
solemn horror which shrouds the iEschylean Darius or 
the Shaksperian Banquo ; even the tragic poets in the 
Frogs maintain the ghostly proprieties better than Teou- 
ngo. This is not because the Chinese play intermingles 
comedy and tragedy, as is usual with the Chinese drama- 
tists; it is because we see the ghost in plain daylight, 
pleading in a court of justice, arguing its case with con- 
summate coolness, and confronting, nay, actually beating 
its false accusers. We may look upon the mutilated 
form of Vergil’s Deiphobus — 

“ Lacerum crudeliter ora, 

Ora manusque ambaa, populataque tempora raptis 
Auribus, et truncas inhoncsto vulnere nares ” — 

or the scornful face of Farinata degli Uberti — 

“ Come avesse lo ’nferno in gran rlispitto ” — 

without starting at the materialism of the thought; but 
this is because we are for the time in Hades, a long way 
from the upper world. But to imagine the effect of 
Teou-ngo on our Western stage we must picture Polydorus’ 
ghost accusing Polymestor in the presence, not only of 
Hecuba, but a full Athenian court, or “ the majesty of 
buried Denmark ” walking arm in arm with Hamlet and 
even beating the astonished Claudius. 


334 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


But, if the marks of family life and family worship 
meet us everywhere in Chinese plays, the social system 
of caste — a system directly opposed to anything like 
Chinese election and examination — has left its marks 
scarcely less distinctly on the Indian drama. Thus, the 
prologue of the Indian plays (partly imitated in the 
V or spiel of Goethe’s Faust) is really a piece of religious 
ceremonial conducted by the Brahmans, and is without 
parallel in the thoroughly secular drama of China. The 
hereditary system of caste has not only led Indian critics 
to assign minutely the proper characteristics of per- 
sonages taken from different social grades, but has even 
left its mark on the language used by the dramatis 
pevsonse. Heroes and principal personages speak San- 
skrit, while the women and inferior characters use the 
modifications of that language comprehended under the 
term Prakrit. “ According to the technical authorities,” 
says Professor Wilson, “ the heroine and principal female 
characters speak Sauraseni ; attendants on royal per- 
sonages, Magadhi ; servants, Raj puts, and traders, Arddha 
or mixed Magadhi. The VidushaJea, or Buffoon, speaks 
the Prachi or Eastern dialect ; rogues use Avantika or 
the language of Ougein ; ” and altogether, as Professor 
Wilson himself adds, if these and other directions were 
implicitly followed, “ a Hindu play would be a polyglot 
that few could hope to understand ; in practice, however, 
we have rarely more than three varieties, or Sanskrit and 
a Prakrit more or less refined.” An interesting example 
of this appropriation of language to social status may be 
observed in the second act of the Mudrd Rakshasa. Here 
Viradhagupta, an agent of Rakshasa, enters disguised as 
a snake-catcher, and, in keeping with the social status of 
the character he has for the moment assumed, addresses 
the passers-by in Prakrit, but when they have gone 


WORLD-LITERATURE IN INDIA AND CHINA. 335 


recovers, as if at one stroke, both his status and his 
language, and soliloquises in Sanskrit. But the social 
system of China permits no such attempts to fix the 
characteristics of dramatis personas after hereditary 
models, or to vary their language in accordance with 
caste. Chinese critics have indeed classified the subjects 
and characters of their dramas, but the classification does 
not represent social distinctions. The diction of Chinese 
plays contains wide differences — the kou-wen or antique 
style, siao-choue or familiar style, in which dialogue is 
commonly written, the hiang-tan or patois of the pro- 
vinces, used in modern pieces and especially in low 
comedy ; but such variations of diction take their origin 
from the nature of the subject, and are no more connected 
with a system of caste than the erroneous English of good 
Mistress Quickly of Eastcheap. 

But it is time to close not only our brief comparison 
of the Chinese and Indian dramas, but the very imperfect 
review of Chinese and Indian literatures which space 
has permitted. Constantly reminded of the littleness of 
individual life by the vast masses of men and women 
among whom they lived, the makers of Indian and 
Chinese literatures turned to the life of Nature and to 
questions of human origin and destiny before which 
individualism can never maintain itself. To detail the 
manner in which the castes and village communities of 
India, the family system and sentiments of China, aided 
by physical conditions, prevented the growth of that 
individualised life which has become in Europe the 
main source of literary as well as scientific ideas, would 
be a task far beyond the limits of a work like the present. 
We have merely selected a few specimens from an 
immense field of inquiry, and rather stated than solved 
some of the problems they suggest. With one other 


336 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


remark we shall close this inadequate notice of a literary 
field so boundless in its wealth of interest. 

Compare the Indian or Chinese poetry of Nature, 
dramatic or otherwise, with that of modern Europe, and 
you discover a striking difference. The cuckoo brings to 
Wordsworth “a tale of visionary hours” — the recollection 
of his personal past never to return again — the memory 
of that “ golden time ” when the cuckoo’s voice was “ a 
mystery,” and earth appeared “an unsubstantial fairy 
place.” In the Oriental poetry this passionate sense of 
personal being is merged in one of social life. Only as 
a representative of his species does the Indian poet 
describe the seasons, only as such does the Chinese 
poet or philosopher describe or speculate. The Oriental 
knows not that concentrated personal being which looks 
on Nature as peculiarly connected with itself alone, and 
is for ever pacing round the haunts of its childhood, 
“ seeking in vain to find the old familiar faces.” Indi- 
vidual life, among the castes and village communities of 
India, or under the family system and paternal govern- 
ment of China, has attained no such social or artistic 
significance as in the West ; and so in the Eastern dramas 
the face of Nature, too great and eternal to be brought 
into direct contrast with the ephemeral units of our 
Western stages, looks out fitly on the castes and families 
of the East. 


BOOK Y. 

NATIONAL LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER L 

WIIAT IS NATIONAL LITERATURE ? 

§87. What is a “nation”? Tlie question has been 
discussed for a variety of purposes, political and philo- 
sophical, without apparently leading to any satisfactory 
definition. Mr. Freeman, for example,* admitting the 
difficulty of definition, tells us that the word " suggests a 
considerable continuous part of the earth’s surface in- 
habited by men who at once speak the same tongue and 
are united under the same government.” This unity of 
territorial possession, language, and government, together 
with the vague requirement of a “ considerable part of the 
earth’s surface,” affords an easy mark for captious criti- 
cism. At least Mr. Freeman’s conception of nationality 
shows that historical accuracy compels us, while assuming 
some normal type of nationhood and treating it as if it 
were permanent, to admit that no definition of nationality 
can express more than a limited range of truth. Such a 
definition cannot cover the entire course of national life, 
for the beginnings of a nation are lost in countless little 
channels whose union has afterwards formed the full 
stream ; and if we pursue this stream far enough we come 
out upon an ocean in which distinctions of clan, city 
commonwealth, nation, are alike lost in cosmopolitanism. 

* Comparative Politics , pp. 81, 83 


340 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


The word “ natio ” points to kinship and a body of 
kinsmen as the primary idea and fact marked by 
-‘nationality.” “Nation,” like demos, carries us back to 
the groups of kinsmen in which social communion all 
the world over is found to begin. But the “ nations ” of 
modern Europe have left these little groups so far behind 
that their culture has either forgotten the nationality of 
common kinship, or learned to treat it as an ideal splen- 
didly false. Old ideas of common descent have been 
weakened in European progress by many causes. As 
the barbarian invaders settled down, ties of communal 
brotherhood tended to be displaced by ties of locality, 
just as among the Hebrews “ Sons of Israel ” had given 
way to the “Sacred Land.” Sir Henry Maine, in his 
Early History of Institutions,* has admirably described 
this process by which the land begins to be the basis 
of society instead of kinship ; ” and in a familiar passage 
of his Ancient Laiu he has traced a corresponding develop- 
ment of territorial from tribal sovereignty. Feudalism, 
linking personal obligations with the ownership of land, 
played a prominent part in this development. Moreover, 
the feudal seigneurs in another way aided in weakening 
the old sentiments of kinship; like the Boman patricians, 
they united ideas of privilege and descent, and prevented 
conceptions of common kinship from being popularised. 
Feudalism, indeed, based as it was upon the life or 
death or coining of age of an individual, could not but 
undermine corporate ideas of clanship and kinship. 
Christianity, again, but in a very different manner from 
feudalism, weakened European ideas of national kinship, 
turning the hopes of the scholar and the serf alike to 
that great democracy of Christian brotherhood before 
which all earthly distinctions of national as well as 
* pp. 73, 


WHAT IS NATIONAL LITERATURE? 


311 


personal descent were but filthy rags in the light of the 
eternal sun. Thus, if feudal exclusiveness narrowed ideas 
of descent in a manner likely to chill popular sympathies 
as soon as “the people” should arise out of isolated 
bourgs and the serfs, the universal ideas of Christianity 
also tended to weaken national kinship by counting every 
individual, irrespective of land or race, as a spiritual 
unit and nothing more. Finally, the growth of the 
towns, upon which the growth of national sentiments, as 
distinct from the localism of feudal life and the uni- 
versalism of Christianity, was so largely to depend, laid 
the foundations of a comparative and historical inquiry 
not to be far pursued without discovering the hybrid 
character of European nations. 

But, though community of blood is disproved by the 
history of each European nation, vague feelings of 
common kinship, no doubt supplemented by love of 
native land, still form the groundwork of national sen- 
timents for the masses. In cultured minds the place of 
such feelings has been taken by respect for common 
language and the long line of literary and scientific 
achievements embodied in that language, and by sympa- 
thies with the historical doings and sufferings of those 
men and women who from age to age have borne the 
nation’s name. To unity of country and government — 
a material rather than an ideal unity — we must add, as 
an element of nationality, respect for the monuments of 
national literature. National literature is an outcome 
of national life, a spiritual bond of national unity, such as 
no amount of eclectic study or cosmopolitan science can 
supply. So thought Goethe, when he said that the 
Germans of his youth, though acquainted with all the 
kinds of poetry in which different nations had distin- 
guished themselves, lacked “national material” — “had 


342 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


handled few national subjects or none at all ; ” * and yet 
Goethe is the admirer of world-literature. 

National literatures, then, require a vigorous arid con- 
tinuous national life ; and if we seek for perfect types of 
national literature, we shall find them only under such 
conditions. In Italy, neither a language delightfully 
musical nor an early development of individualism of 
character within her cities could make up for the loss of 
such a life ; nationality was here paralysed by the over- 
lordship of the German emperor, the presence of a world- 
religion visibly centred in that ancient capital which 
might have been the heart of an Italian nation, the strife 
of city commonwealths strangely like and unlike those 
of ancient Greece. In Germany the isolation of the 
feudal princes and of the towns aided the cosmopolitan 
ideas of the Holy Roman Empire in checking the pro- 
gress of nationality. Russia, long the prey of Asiatic 
invaders, and exposed as a kind of rude barrier for the 
security of quiet culture in the West, was equally slow 
in manifesting signs of national life. In short, we may 
say that only in England, France, and Spain do we find 
truly national groups ; and, when we remember how the 
burst of national life in Spain under Charles V. and 
Philip II. was succeeded by three centuries of compara- 
tive stagnation, we may add that, if continuous develop- 
ment be one grand mark of nationality, England and 
France, especially from a literary standpoint, are the 
only perfect types of nationhood yet known to history. 
But they are types to be contrasted as well as compared ; 
and the contrast will enable us to distinguish two aspects 
curiously different under which national literature has 
revealed itself. 

§ 88. A. W. Schlegel, discussing the progress of the 

* Wahrheit und Diclitung , bk. vii. 


WHAT IS NATIONAL LITERATURE? 


343 


Italian drama, notices the opinion of Calsabigi, that 
the decline of dramatic poetry in Italy was caused by 
“ the want of permanent companies of players and of a 
capital” In Italy and Germany, says Schlegel, “ where 
there are only capitals of separate states but no general 
metropolis, great difficulties are opposed to the improve- 
ment of the theatre.” * These observations of an Italian 
and a German critic suggest the most vital distinction 
in the literary development of England and France — the 
different degrees of literary centralism reached by the 
two countries. 

In the literature of Fi ance, since the firm establish- 
ment of centralised monarchy in the seventeenth century, 
we everywhere feel the presence of that centralising 
spirit which in the Academie Franpaise found a local 
habitation and a name. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his 
essay on the literary influence of academies, f has shown 
how much may be said for literary centralism. The im- 
provement of the French language, as the statutes of the 
Academy bear witness, was the great aim of the institu- 
tion ; and opponents of such institutions must admit the 
usefulness of this aim and the success of the Academy in 
this direction. In a democratic age, moreover, when, as 
De Toequeville observed, accuracy of literary style is 
liable to be lost in the temporary predominance of inferior 
work, a central tribunal may maintain an ideal of style 
which in the rush of trade-literature is likely to be 
trampled underfoot. Still, Mr. Arnold’s conception of 
provincialism cannot be accepted either as in harmony 
with English literary development in the past, or as a 
prophetic forecast of its future. A critic, himself 
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of French criticism, 

* Dramatic Art and Literature, lect. xvi. 

t Essays in Criticism, pp. 42, sqq. (ed. 1 884). 


344 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


would plant on English soil an exotic as indigenous to 
Paris as it is unsuited to the atmosphere of English 
national life. Another critic — Macaulay, in his essay on 
the Roijal Society of Literature , — takes a very different 
view of learned academies and their literary influences. 
It is in literary academies, he tells us, that “ envy and 
faction exert the most extensive and pernicious influence.” 
The history of the French Academy, in particular, has 
been “an uninterrupted record of servile compliances, 
paltry artifices, deadly quarrels, perfidious friendships.” 
Governed by the court, the Sorbonne, the philosophers, 
“it was always equally powerful for evil and impotent 
for good ” — sought to depress Corneille, long refused to 
notice Yoltaire, and even under the superintendence of 
D’Alembert was the home of the basest intrigues. There 
is some exaggeration in this view ; yet Macaulay ex- 
presses the national spirit of English literature. Local 
and individual independence from the control of any 
central corporation is the peculiar characteristic of 
English literature — an independence equally removed 
from the dictation of a tribunal like the French 
Academy, and that total absence of any literary centre 
which Sehlegel and Calsabigi deplore. 

Mr. Arnold’s transference of the French centralism 
into the life of English literature is capable of its best 
defence from the standpoint of cosmopolitan culture. 
From this standpoint national centres like Paris and its 
Academy become the best substitute for a world-centre 
which differences of language and national character 
cannot permit. “ Let us conceive the whole group of 
civilised nations,” says Mr. Arnold,* “ as being, for 
intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confede- 
ration bound to a joint action and working towards a 
* Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems. 


WHAT IS NATIONAL LITERATURE? 


345 


common result. This was the ideal of Goethe, and it is 
an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our 
modern societies more and more.” Yes ; the ideal of 
world-literature, which Herder’s Voices of the People did 
so much to foster in Germany, is attractive, especially to 
men who have never known true national unity. But, 
however deeply national literature may be indebted to 
an international exchange of ideas, however splendid may 
be the conception of universal principles in literary pro- 
duction and criticism, the true makers of national litera- 
ture are the actions and thoughts of the nation itself; 
the place of these can never be taken by the sympathies 
of a cultured class too wide to be national, or those of a 
central academy too refined to be provincial. Provin- 
cialism is no ban in truly national literature. The influ- 
ence of London has indeed been continually expressed by 
Chaucer, by Shakspere, by Milton, by Dryden, by Addi- 
son and Pope and Johnson. Perhaps the flavour of 
London life has been sometimes too strong in English 
literature.* But provincial language as well as spirit 
have found a ready place in the literature .of England. 

Here, then, we have two types of national literature 
— the English, blending local and central elements of 
national life without losing national unity in local distinc- 
tions such as Italy and Germany have known too well ; 
the French, centralising its life in Paris, and so tending to 
prefer cosmopolitan ideals. Montesquieu tells us that he 
would subordinate his personal interests to those of’ his 
family, those of his family to those of his nation, those of 
his nation to the good of Europe and of the world, f In 

* It lias been said of Hogarth (1697-1764) that he depicted the man- 
ners of the London populace rather than those of the English people ; 
the remark might be applied to a good deal of English literature in tho 
eighteenth century. 

f (Euvres de Montesquieu , Pensees di verses, t. ii. p. 456. 


346 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the development of national literatures we must picture 
something of the same kind, only allowing for the early 
influence of Christian world-religion, and not forgetting 
that special causes have given to some national litera- 
tures of Europe a more cosmopolitan aspect than to others. 
To watch the internal and external development by which 
local and national differences give way in turn to national 
and cosmopolitan ideals — this is one line of study open to 
students of national literatures ; another is the deepening 
and widening of personal character which accompany 
such social expansion ; a third is the changing aspect of 
physical nature which this social and individual evolution 
likewise involves. But to chronicle the rise of new 
forms, new spirits, of verse and prose in each European 
nation, and the gradual separation of science from litera- 
ture ; to trace such growth to its roots in social and 
physical causes; finally, to compare and contrast these 
causes as producing the diverse literatures of England and 
France and Germany, of Italy and Spain and Russia; 
this, truly, were the task of a literary Hercules. We 
shall here but briefly illustrate the evolution of indi- 
vidualism in national literatures and the effect of such 
evolution on man’s views of physical nature. 


CHAPTER II. 

MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 

§ 89. At first sight it might seem that the individual 
and not the social spirit laid the foundations of national 
literature throughout Europe. In such early extant 
specimens of Saxon, German, and French poetry as 
Beowulf, the Lay of the Nibelungs, and the oldest Chansons 
de Geste, the note of communal song is subordinated to 
that of personal glory. Whatever choral odes or hymns 
the clans and village communities of Teuton and Celt 
may have possessed, we have now but scanty indications 
of their existence ; and such glimpses of communal lite- 
rature as we do find are to be observed only through a 
dense growth of individualised poetry. 

At this fact, however apparently inimical to our view 
of literary development, we need not be surprised ; for 
the most powerful causes united to obscure the social 
beginnings of modern European literatures. Clan songs 
and hymns, full of pagan worship and unchristian con- 
ceptions of clan duties, like Blood-revenge and a Shadow- 
world such as the gathering-place of the Hebrew kinsmen, 
could have little to attract the class to which we are 
indebted for almost all we know of European barbarism 
— the Christian clergy. Moreover, contact with Roman 
life and habits of military service in the imperial armies 
16 


348 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


must have done much to weaken clanship and strengthen 
the power of the chiefs long before the inroads of the 
barbarians commenced. This aristocracy of chiefs had 
as little interest in treasuring up the folk-songs of their 
tribesmen (which could not but contain many a reminder 
of the social equality typified by the story of the Yase of 
Soissons) as the monks ; and, even if they had the desire 
to perpetuate such songs, they lacked the requisite degree 
of education. Thus on all sides causes combined to 
obscure the very existence of any rude literary begin- 
nings save those which the individualising life of the 
chiefs and, later on, the seigneurs permitted, or the 
laborious learning of the monks attempted in their Latin 
world-language in the belief that it alone was the proper 
instrument of literature. Local isolation and feudal indi- 
vidualism could not create national languages or senti- 
ments; the universal religion of Christ had its world- 
language already made; it seemed for a time as if no 
social maker of national literature were to arise. 

We cannot now enter upon that vast field at present 
attracting the labours of antiquarians, jurists, historical 
economists — the changes undergone by the clans of bar- 
baric Europe in their degradation into the serfs of feudal 
lords. Even a general picture of these changes could not 
fail to introduce features more or less untrue in certain 
places, and suggesting a transition in some cases too rapid, 
in others too slow. In Northern Italy, for example, town 
life and the municipal system, upon which Lome’s empire 
had been based, were so strong that the barbarians readily 
adopted city organization, and feudalism as known else- 
where was checked in its development. In Southern 
France, also, the municipal system continued to hold its 
own ; and here, as among the Italian towns, arose by de- 
grees an individualism of the old Greek and Loman stamp, 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


349 


and quite different from that of the feudal castle. Else- 
where, however, the old domination of city life was over- 
thrown, and a lasting preponderance of the country over 
the town established. It was during this preponderance of 
country life that the villagers, dependent on feudal lords 
and their men-at-arms, fell into a serfdom frequently 
more oppressive than pagan slavery. Unbound to their 
masters by any ties of sentiment or kinship, held together 
solely by the force of their local despot, hopeless for the 
future, ignorant of the past, shut out from each other and 
made the enemies of each other by their lords’ raids, these 
villages, whether descended from provincials of Home 
or barbarian clans, could feel none of that free enthu- 
siasm in life which makes the flesh and blood of song. 
Before the life of men in groups could again become a 
song-maker, some degree of social happiness, some width 
of social sympathy, some sense of a free equality which 
slaves attached to the land or person of a lord could not 
feel, needed to be developed. This development was the 
work of the towns throughout Europe; it is with their 
struggle into independence from feudal control that 
social sentiments, the earliest makers of song, rise as in 
resurrection from the grave in which they had been 
buried with the old clan communities of Celt and 
Teuton. 

§ 90. Thus from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, 
from the fall of Borne to the rise of the cities, two indi- 
vidualising types of human character prevail— the monk 
and the baron; and the Christian resignation of the 
former as well as the brutal or chivalrous prowess of the 
latter need not here be illustrated from Latin chronicle 
or early chanson. For neither of these types can any 
deep sense of personality be claimed. The man of mail, 
you may see from his songs, thinks of personality as so 


350 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


much blood, bone, and muscle, whose duty it is to joust or 
war, if possible, in the romanceful twilight of love and 
chivalry, but in any case to war. The man of prayer, 
if his sense of personality be less material, clothes his 
spiritual self and his entire spirit-world in sensual shapes, 
and would treat as a heretic any who might hint an 
objection against such earthly dress. Warrior and saint 
alike touch but the surface of personality; if it be so 
objective for the former as to be identified with animal 
strength, it is for the latter the sensual prop on which 
his “ Bealism ” is supported. How is the growth of the 
cities connected with these types of weak personality ? 
If these show themselves in monkish chronicle or baronial 
“ epic,” do not the commune and the bourg reflect them- 
selves in a literary form of their own ? 

It is no mere accident that brings together the rise of 
the modern European drama and that of towns ; a brief 
contrast of feudal and town life will prove this. The lord 
in his fortified castle, surrounded by his family and armed 
retinue — such is the centre of each feudal molecule. 
Beyond the castle walls a group of serfs cultivates the 
lord’s lands ; and, though the village church may stand 
as a reminder that there is an ideal of human unity before 
which even the gulf which separates serf and lord disap- 
pears, the castle chapel has its own caretaker of souls 
who is himself of knightly parentage, loftily patronises 
the village priest, and reminds the villagers that the 
Christian ideal of human equality is indeed only an ideal. 
Between this outer circle of the feudal group and the 
lord’s family there is, in fact, no tie save that of force, no 
spiritual link save the ceremonial of Christian worship. 
This ceremonial is, indeed, a drama in miniature ; but so 
long as there is only one gigantic personality of force 
(that of the lord), so long as bonds of social sympathy 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


351 


are wanting, sacred story alone can supply the personages 
or incidents of a dramatic spectacle. 

Let us change the scene to a medieval town. Insur- 
rection, or aid from the king, or commerce, has been here 
at work ; that servile circle of the feudal camp which 
had been hewers of wood and drawers of water now lives 
within stone walls, and can stand a siege or make a sally 
as well as the best of armoured knights. The burghers 
have little feeling of fellowship with other towns ; their 
group is rather an offensive and defensive alliance against 
all comers than any forecast of national burghership and 
the modern rule of the European bourgeois . But though 
their social sympathies are narrow, they are also intensely 
real ; moreover, an infantine subdivision of labour and 
trade is going on ; the magistracy and the clergy are 
being organised ; new types of character, far different 
from knight and squire and man-at-arms, are being 
developed. If modern prose is being roughly hammered 
into shape in the townsmen’s assemblies and their 
preachers’ pulpits, the elements of a drama are also at 
hand. How does the communal life of the medieval bouvg 
display itself in the townsmen’s drama ? 

The relation of Mysteries, Miracle-plays, Moralities, to 
the growth of towns all over Europe is a subject which 
has not received the attention it deserves ; and the conse- 
quences have been that neither has the peculiar nature of 
this early drama been understood as reflecting contem- 
porary social life, nor has the growth of the drama of 
personal character out of these old spectacles been ex- 
plained as accompanying the evolution of society. We 
must at the outset get rid of a fallacy which blinds the 
eyes of many students to the influences of the towns upon 
the early drama of modern Europe — the fallacy of finding 
in the Biblical incidents and personages of the Mysteries 


352 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and Miracle-plays the key to all their characteristics. 
The abstract, allegorical, impersonal characters of these 
spectacles cannot be attributed to the nature of the 
Christian faith ; for in the early days of that faith 
profound problems of personal being — personal immor- 
tality, responsibility, and the like — had formed, with 
subtle speculations on the subject of the Trinity, the 
great questions of Christianised Greek intellect. The 
truth is that a new communal life was giving a new 
prominence to the impersonal, the allegorical, in religion 
and philosophy and poetry. Men again, but under very 
different conditions from those of the clan, had merged 
their sense of personality in that of group life, content to 
leave to feudal lords those sentiments of individualism 
which, in the tars of serfs or townsmen but lately freed 
from serfdom, sounded of the lord’s tyranny and the 
tortures of hell, devoutly believed and hoped to be 
reserved for such strongly marked personalities. No 
doubt there are wide differences between a body of feudal 
serfs fighting their way to burghership and clan corpora- 
tions of kinsmen. No doubt there are differences almost 
as wide between a commune of France, or a chartered 
town of medieval Spain, Germany, England, and the city 
commonwealths of Greece before they began to lose the 
clan feeling of identity between the citizen and his city 
group. Yet in one fundamental point the characteristics 
of the city commonwealth and the clan are repeated in 
these European organisations — in the subordination of the 
individual to the corporation of which he is a member. 
It is here that we discover the social maker of the 
medieval drama’s abstract and allegorical and impersonal 
characteristics. 

§ 91. The communal authorship of the Mysteries and 
Miracle-plays recalls that clan ownership of early song to 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


353 


which we have elsewhere alluded. “ Le Mystere du Vieil 
Testament” for example, “ n’est-pas une oeuvre personnelle 
dont il y ait lieu de rechercher l’auteur; c’est une oeuvre 
collective, qui a du s’elaborer lentement pendant le cours 
du xv e siecle.” * Whatever importance the clergy pos- 
sessed as the first makers of rude plays, both the making 
and acting, sooner or later, passed into the hands of guilds 
— either the trade-guilds of the town, or bodies of literary 
craftsmen who (like the Homeridae or the Hebrew 
musician-clans) assumed the familiar organisation of the 
guild. Thus, the Chester Mysteries, performed for the 
last time in 1574, were acted by trading companies of 
that city. In France it was out of the Town-Guilds that 
the Confrerie de la Passion was formed — a fraternity which, 
chiefly composed of tradesmen and citizens of Paris, 
played Mysteries from 1402 to 1548. At Coventry 
particular parts of the Mystery were assigned to par- 
ticular trading companies; thus, the Smiths’ Company 
acted the Trial and Crucifixion, the Cappers’ Company 
acted the Resurrection and the Descent into Hell, f In 
Germany Master-Singer Guilds for the composition and 
recitation of verse were established at Mayence, Ulm, 
Niirnberg, and other towns, the old “ Singing School ” at 
Niirnberg being maintained as late as 1770. The famous 
scene of the Tower of Babel in the Mystere du Vieil Testa- 
ment , in which the carpenter Gaste-Bois (Spoil-wood), the 
mason Casse-Tuileau (Break-tile), and the rest, are me- 
dieval guildsmen doing duty as Nimrod’s workmen, 
graphically illustrates the dramatic workmanship of these 
literary guilds. But the impersonal view of human 
character taken by these corporations is a more interest- 
ing evidence of communal feeling than this impersonal 

* Baron James de Rothschild’s Introduction , p. iv. 

t Cf. History of Early English Guilds , Early English Text Society, 

1870. 


354 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


authorship, just as the gradual disappearance of sacred 
and allegorical characters before the growth of indi- 
vidualism in the towns is a still more interesting evidence 
of the dependence of literature on social evolution. Let 
us take a bird’s-eye view of this dramatic evolution from 
communal to individual life. 

I. The sacred spectacle, exhibited by the clergy in 
town or monastery, either written completely in Latin, or 
intermixed with French or German, as the case may be, 
presents divine personages who, like the heroes of the 
early Attic stage, present at once an abstract and his- 
torical character. The first great Miracle-play of German 
origin {The Bise and Fall of Antichrist, an Easter play of 
the tenth century, found in the Convent of Tegernsee in 
the Bavarian Highlands) is in Latin, and contains such 
personages as Paganism and the Jewish Synagogue (intro- 
duced as women), Mercy, Justice, Hypocrisy, Heresy. In 
the old French Miracle-play, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 
“ Christ speaks, or rather sings, in the words of the Latin 
Bible ; but he then repeats what he has said in Provencal 
verse, which is also used by the Virgins.” In fact, the 
Latin Mysteries were easily elaborated out of the Officia 
of the Church ; and old remains of Officia used for this 
dramatic purpose have been discovered at Freising in 
Bavaria, at Orleans, Limoges, and Bouen. “From the 
time of Gregory the Great the Mass itself became an 
almost dramatic celebration of the world-tragedy of 
Golgotha. It embraced the whole scale of religious 
emotion, from the mournful cry of the Miserere to the 
jubilee of the Gloria in excelsis .” 

II. Though the personages of the Latin Mysteries were 
a -ready rather allegorical and abstract than individual 
and concrete, the use of vernacular languages and the 
consequent influx of prevalent ideas so much increased 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITEEATUEE. 


355 


this tendency, that in most literary histories attempts are 
made to distinguish the Mysteries, with their sacred per- 
sonages, from the Moralities, with their allegorical cha- 
racters, Virtue, Vice, Pity, and the rest. But we cannot 
distinguish these spectacles by any fixed line; we can 
only say that the popularisation of the drama which is 
marked by the use of the vernacular languages is accom- 
panied by an increased love of abstractions and allegories ; 
and the student of contemporary social life cannot fail to 
observe how this love of impersonal being reflects that 
tendency towards corporate or guild life which is the 
most striking characteristic of the growing towns. It 
must not be forgotten that nameless characters (such as 
L’Evesque, Le Prescheur, L’Ermite, in the Miracles de 
Notre Dame) are not individuals properly so called, but 
types of classes, and as such deriving their interest from a 
social life which (like that of the German towns even in 
the days of Hans Sachs) could be marked off into trades 
almost as distinct as Eastern castes. The prevalence of 
allegorical thought and ideas of men in classes or types 
can, indeed, be illustrated from all kinds of medieval 
literature as well as the drama; the satirical allegory 
of Piers Ploughman, or Kabelais, or Das Narrenschiff of 
Sebastian Brandt, with its hundred and ten classes of 
fools, might be readily traced to conditions of social life. 
So, too, in Chaucers famous tales, Knight and Squire, 
Prioress and Monk and Friar, the Shipman, the Doctor of 
Physic, and the rest, in spite of individualising touches, 
are primarily types of social classes ; while in the Haber- 
dasher, Carpenter, Webbe, Dyer, Tapicer, all “clothed in 
one livery of a solemn and great fraternity,” we have the 
guild directly introduced. Every reader of medieval 
literature knows the popularity and perpetual allegory of 
the Roman de la Rose , echoed in the Faux-Danqier, 


356 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Deplaisir, Esperance , of even the lyric poet Charles 
cT Orleans ; so, too, in the chivalrous allegory of Spenser 
we may find these corporate modes of thought decked in 
feudal trappings, and meeting that individualising spirit of 
the Elizabethan age, which, in the drama of Marlowe and 
Shakspere, displaced the abstract and typical by the 
individual and concrete. 

III. But the names of Marlowe and Shakspere suggest 
a third stage of the early European drama, in which we 
approach the analysis of personal character more closely 
than in the sacred or allegorical spectacle, yet not so 
closely as some enthusiastic worshippers of the great 
English dramatist would have us believe. When we find 
historical personages in such Miracle-plays as Robert le 
Diable or Guillaume du Desert side by side with alle- 
gorical personages, w*e may be sure that the historical 
drama is not so closely connected with profound analysis 
of individual character as has been sometimes assumed. 
When it is remembered that the Mysteries w r ere primarily 
sacred histories (certain English Mysteries, for example, 
presenting a picture of the world’s progress from the 
Creation and anticipating its future to the Day of Judg- 
ment), the secular history and the sacred spectacle cannot 
be separated by a very wide gulf. Let it also be remem- 
bered that one of the marked features of the Chinese 
drama — in which analysis of individual character is, as 
already explained, peculiarly deficient — is the frequent 
use of historical incidents and personages. The historical 
drama and subtle analyses of character are, in fact, rather 
opposed than, as some maintain, closely connected. No 
doubt there are wide differences between what may be 
termed an antiquarian historical drama, such as modern 
dramatists have sometimes attempted, and “ histories ” in 
the Shaksperian sense. No doubt Shakspere, in some of 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


357 


his historical plays, was as little hampered in his creative 
imagination as the Attic dramatists, when they used the 
heroes of old Greek story as a canvas on which almost 
any variety of character might be depicted. Still, we 
must admit that the truly creative conception of dramatic 
art is opposed to the necessary restrictions- of historic fact, 
and must look upon the early “histories/* with their 
improprieties of time and place and character, rather as 
secular imitations of the sacred story detailed in the 
Mysteries, than as a sign that the drama had now passed 
out of its religious tutelage and the region of moral 
abstractions into the sphere of artistic “realism.” For 
dramatic “ realism ” means something more than the 
copying of historic fact ; it means the putting together of 
a character in such a way that it shall wear the look of an 
individual reality without being an exact reproduction 
of any personage we already know ; it means that the 
dramatic personage must be at once an individual and 
something more, an abstract type and something less — in a 
word, a double-faced entity containing both an individual 
and a general element, and so reproducing in art the most 
profound truth of human experience — that individual 
being is only realisable as a contrast between self and 
not-self. 

IV. This dramatic realism is only possible where social 
conditions foster sufficient personal freedom in action and 
thought to allow a vivid realisation of personal as distinct 
from corporate being ; it is only possible where socialism 
is not carried into such an excess as to merge individuality 
in group life, and where individualism is not carried into 
such an excess as to make personality insignificant by 
destroying all bonds of social thought and action. 
Dramatic realism needs personal freedom from communal 
restraints, various types of personality, and, coexisting 


358 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


with this freedom and variety, a fund of social sympathies 
and a belief in the dignity and mysterious greatness of 
individual being. In Elizabethan England and the Spain 
of Charles Y. and Philip II., a variety of causes had 
supplied these elements of dramatic art. In both coun- 
tries the individualism of the feudal lords had been forced 
to live in peaceful relations with the corporate life of the 
towns by a strong centralism holding in its hands the 
reins of local government. In France, too, a like growth 
of central authority was drawing together these types of 
ultra-corporate and ultra-individual life. Indeed, it is at 
this confluence of the feudal with the corporate spirit that 
we reach the full stream of national literature in each 
European country ; and perhaps the best point from which 
we may view the meeting of the waters is supplied by a 
dramatist whose fatherland was destined to bitterly ex- 
perience the want of a central arbitrator between the 
nobles and the towns. 

§ 92. Hans Sachs, born at Nurnberg in 1494, stands 
on the borderland which divides the old allegorising 
drama, with its acting guilds and impersonal authorship, 
from the drama of personal authorship and individualised 
character. Sachs, as Dr. Karl Hase * observes, “ attempts 
no subjective development of character, but simply causes 
his personages to translate into action, or more often into 
dialogue only, the event which he wishes to represent.” 
Like the writers of Mysteries, also, he places Christianity 
and heathendom closely together. “Next to God the 
Father and God the Son appear Jupiter and AidoIIo; at 
the Last Judgment the bark of Charon bears the departed 
souls ; with the Judgment of Solomon appears the Choice 
of Paris.” But, though proprieties of time and place are 

* Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas , by Dr. Karl Hr.se ; translated by 
A. W. Jackson, and edited by Rev. W. W. Jackson (Triibncr, 1880). 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


359 


ignored, the life of the great German free towns being 
transferred to Hebrew and Christian story, though tragedy 
and comedy are still combined as in the Mysteries or in a 
Chinese play, the subdivision of labour in towns is, in the 
theatre of Hans Sachs, individualising the types of the old 
spectacle, and Sachs’ conception of the burghers and the 
nobles, as divided by God Himself into castes, marks 
the union of two spirits — that of the hereditary feudal 
seigneurs and that of the town corporations. 

Sachs’ comedy, Eves Unlike Children , introduced by 
the usual herald of the Mysteries, illustrates this union of 
town and castle, feudal lord and trading burgher. The 
division of labour is attributed to God, who, having come 
down from heaven to examine Cain and Abel in Dr. 
Luther’s Catechism, is shocked by the contemptuous 
ignorance of Cain, whose time is spent in running wild 
about the streets (clearly a reminiscence of the German 
town rather than the plains of Asia), and who, with his 
wicked brothers, four in number, ranged before the Lord, 
expresses “a passionate dislike for the examination.” The 
Lord laments their impiety, which is to bring down an 
inherited curse in the shape of hard labour. 

“ Therefore on earth shall be your place 
As a poor, rough, and toiling race, 

As peasants, woodmen, charcoal-burners, 

Herdsmen, hangmen, knackers, turners, 

Grooms, broom-makers, beadles, tailors, 

Serfs, shoemakers, carters, sailors, 

Jacob’s brethren, rustics coarse, 

Hireling men w ith one resource — 

A labouring life and little gain.” 

Dr. Hase notices as a remarkable fact that Hans Sachs, 
not only here but elsewhere, has adopted “ the harsh aris- 
tocratic theory which would derive the scions of every 
noble house from a pious and divinely favoured ancestry, 
and the pith of the nation, which supports the upper 


360 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


classes, from a race under the divine ban.” But when it 
is remembered how the medieval trades tended to adopt a 
spirit of caste in their guilds, and how the towns had 
sprung for the most part out of hereditary serfs, this 
peculiar version of the old clan ethics of inherited sin 
need not surprise us. Sachs afterwards rearranged this 
play under the name How God the Lord blesses the 
Children of Adam and Eve ; and here we again meet the 
doctrine of a divine fate in the social status of men. 
Eve brings her four favourite children to Adam as the 
most likely to please the Lord. Adam praises them, 
but inquires for the rest of his children who ought also 
to receive God’s blessing. Eve replies that they are 
too ugly and dirty to be shown ; “ some are hidden in 
the hay in the stable, some are asleep behind the fire- 
place.” Adam thinks differently, but agrees to bring 
forward the four better-looking children. The Lord 
comes, and at Eve’s request blesses these four children. 
The first shall be a great king, and as such receives 
the gift of a sceptre ; the next shall be a warrior, and 
is presented with shield and sword ; the third shall be 
a burgomaster with judicial staff, and the fourth a 
wealthy merchant, whose portion is a set of weights and 
measures. Every one shall remain in his own station — 
an idea thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of medieval 
guilds. The Lord then takes the children for a walk in 
Paradise. Meanwhile Eve, left to herself, regrets that 
she had not brought forward the other children also; 
and, though the sun has almost set, the Lord waits for 
Eve to present the four boys whom she now takes out of 
the hay. They, however, have not learned to pray pro- 
perly; and Eve receives from the Lord a reprimand in 
consequence. Still the Lord is not unwilling to bless 
them. The first shall be a shoemaker, and his gift is a 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


361 


last; the second receives a weaver’s shuttle; the third, 
a shepherd’s pouch ; the fourth shall be a peasant, and to 
him is given a ploughshare. Eve, astonished, asks — 

“ O, thou most gracious Lord of heaven, 

Why is thy blessing so uneven ? 

Since sons they are of Adam born, 

All equal, why hold four in scorn ? 

Since some as great men thou hast blest, 

Why common folk should be the rest — 

Shoemakers, weavers, herdsmen, hinds ? ” 

But the Lord replies that each has been selected according 
to his natural fitness, and points out the dependence of 
each rank of society on the other. 

“ One class is even as another, 

Each rank of service to its brother. . . , 

Be each man on his calling bent, 

And every man shall be content.” 

§ 93. But, while the individualism of the feudal lords 
and the socialism of corporate life were thus meetiug 
under the shadow of central government, there was one 
part of Europe in which, from an early date, the conflict 
of the individual with the group had made its appearance. 
The Lombard League, victorious in its conflict with the 
world-empire of Barbarossa, had allowed the city common- 
wealths of Italy to develop within their walls an indi- 
vidualising spirit which could ill brook the reins of the 
Christian world-religion. The conflict between this indi- 
vidualising life of the Italian republics and the spiritual 
brotherhood of Christianity inspires the chant-like song 
of Dante, on whose inexpressibly mournful face the 
deadliest struggle of which human nature is capable — 
the struggle of intensely individual with intensely cor- 
porate feeling — seems graven as in scars. But in the 
Divina Commedia individualism is victorious, and in the 
Italian cities wealth and faction displaced the social spirit 


362 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


of Christianity by one of personal passion scarcely to be 
paralleled save in the decaying republics of ancient 
Greece. At first glance the Italian towns would seem 
the veritable home of a drama full of individual cha- 
racterisation. But excessive individualism is almost as 
fatal to dramatic progress as a corporate life in which all 
differences of personality are lost. Innumerable units, 
raised out of individual littleness by no bond of corporate 
union, become too ephemeral to attract the analyses of the 
artist, who will soon prefer to turn to physical nature or to 
Fate. Individual being, which only comes out distinctly 
on a great background of social sentiments, could not 
alone supply the Italian republics with an original drama. 
Moreover, the similarity of the Italian dialects to Latin 
turned men’s attention to classical models, in which they 
found a spirit like their own already expressed ; and, 
when the plays of Seneca were supplemented by the 
recovered masterpieces of Greece, it was clear that any 
indigenous Italian drama was doomed. 

Thus their social conditions and the peculiar nearness 
of classical associations united to make the Italian drama 
an imitation of classical models. Such, for example, was 
the Bosmunda of Iiucellai, represented before Leo X. at 
Florence in 1515 — a play which retains the classical 
chorus, and contains direct imitations of the Antigone; 
such, also, is the Sophonisba of Trissino, which (though 
not published till 1521) suggested the former, and is 
written on the Greek model, being divided, not into acts, 
but only by choral odes. It is significant that Trissino 
found his model in Euripides, the tragedian of Attic indi- 
vidualism. The declamatory tone, which had been one of 
the marks of decadence in the Athenian drama, and (as 
has been pointedly observed) “ fixes the attention of the 
hearer on the person of the actor rather than on his 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


363 


relation to the scene,” soon disclosed itself in the Italian 
theatres ; and even such poets as Ariosto and Tasso failed 
to create a real and lifelike drama within the shell of the 
classical form. In half a century the appearance of the 
Pastoral drama, based on the Theocritean dramatic idyll, 
and in less than a century that of the Opera, showed how 
poets were turning (as Agathon and Chaeremon had 
turned) from the dramatist’s function — creation of indi- 
vidual character — to physical nature and the embellish- 
ments of music. 

But though the Italian drama was not destined to do 
great things in its own country, its influences on other 
countries were powerful. In England and Spain, indeed, 
corporate and individual being met and produced dramatic 
originality as striking as the same conscious conflict had 
struck out in Athens. Here the development of the 
drama from the social figures of the early spectacles to 
subtle displays of individual personality was unbroken. 
In Skakspere himself the marks of the old spectacles are 
evident. Beside his many real fictions, which so wonder- 
fully unite the breadth of a general type with the deepest 
individual personality, we find figures such as Rumour in 
the Induction to the Second Part of Henry IV., reminding 
us of many a symbolical character in the Mysteries ; the 
half-mythical, half-divine Hymen in As You Like It stands 
side by side with characters so carefully individualised as 
Rosalind and Celia ; Sbakspere’s clowns clearly present a 
transition from typical personages like the old Vice to 
such a marked individuality as that of Touchstone; 
moreover, the allegorical personage Time, who, “as 
chorus ” at the opening of Act IV. in Winter's Tale, 
apologises for sliding over sixteen years, reminds us that 
Shakspere’s disregard of the “ unities,” as well as his 
mixture of tragic with comic scenes, was largely due to 


364 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the influence of Mysteries and Moralities.* Individualism 
is indeed the dominant note in Shakspere’s drama, but it 
maintains its profound interest because of the multitude 
of voices above which it is clearly heard ; the secret of 
the master lies not in his having “ incarnated feudalism 
in literature ” (as Walt Whitman says), not in his having 
championed the cause of the nobles (as Bumelin tells us), 
but in his combining, as iEschylus and Sophocles before 
him had combined, the conflicting spirits of corporate and 
individual life now walking side by side through the 
streets of Elizabethan London. Here, for a time at least, 
was no place for classical and Italian restrictions ; the 
remonstrances of Sidney ( Defence of Poesie), against “our 
tragedies and comedies observing rules neither of honest 
civilitie nor of skilful poetrie,” knew not that a more 
vigorous life than even that of Periclean Athens was pro- 
ducing for itself its own dramatic principles. 

But if Elizabethan London did not supply an audience 
sufficiently polite and erudite to appreciate the classical 
and Italian restrictions, the courtly centralism of Paris, 
opposed to strong emotions as breaches of etiquette, easily 
submitted its theatre to classical imitation. In 1552, 
only five years after the Pai Lament of Paris had sup- 
pressed the Fraternity of the Passion, Jodelle, father of 
the regular French drama, exhibited his tragedy of 
Cleopatre before Henry II. The play is simple, devoid 
of action and stage effect, full of long speeches, with a 
chorus at the end of every act ; but, as if anticipating 
the future destroyer of national drama in France, the 
troop of performers, whose Mysteries had been so lately 
interdicted, “availed themselves of an exclusive privilege 

* Milton’s original plan of Paradise Lost as an allegorical drama, 
with abstract personages and a chorus, would have curiously blended 
the mauner of the Mysteries with classical form. Even in Samson 
Agonistes, as is well known, we have a double allegory. 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


365 


granted by Charles VI., and, preventing the representa- 
tion of the Gleopatre by public actors, forced Jodelle to 
have it performed by his friends.’ , No trade-union of 
actors, however, could check the growth of classical taste. 
The Agamemnon of Toutain, taken from Seneca, the 
dramatist whose rushlight was to be too often preferred 
by French artists to the full splendour of Attic tragedy, 
was published in 1557 ; and in 1580 were published the 
eight tragedies of Robert Gamier, which closely follow 
the plots of Seneca or Euripides, contain long speeches, 
relate events chiefly by messengers, and employ the 
chorus between every act. 

Between the writers of any particular age, says 
Shelley, in the preface to his Revolt of Islam, “there 
must be a resemblance which does not depend upon their 
own will. They cannot escape from subjection to a 
common influence which arises out of an infinite com- 
bination of circumstances belonging to the times in 
which they live ; though each is in a degree the author 
of the very influence by which his being is thus per- 
vaded/’ The symmetry of form and analysis of indi- 
vidual character in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles 
exactly suited the time-spirit of Faris after the Wars of 
Religion had centralised culture in the courts of Louis 
XIII. and the “ Grand Monarch.” It has been said that 
the famous line of Corneille’s Medee (1635) — 

“ Que vous restc-t-il contre tant d’ennemis ? 

— Moi ! ” 

was the cogito, ergo sum of French tragedy, and struck its 
keynote — that of individual character.* If such study 
of character had been extended to all sorts and conditions 
of men and women in French society, if it had not been 
fettered by proprieties of Parisian etiquette and classical 
* Cf. llistoire de France , H. Martin, liv. xiii. p. 552. 


366 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


taste, France would have possessed a truly national 
drama. As it was, however, the Parisian tragedy failed 
to truthfully reflect even the life of Paris, much less that 
of France in general. On the one hand, the characters 
and social life of the classical theatre are Gallicised ; in 
Andromaque the stigmas of slavery are wiped out, in 
Iphigenie Achilles is gifted with Parisian gallantry, 
in Phedre the centre of interest is shifted from the hero 
of Euripides to a heroine more in accordance with 
Parisian sentiment.* On the other, the Parisian theatre 
was divorced from the provincial life of France and con- 
demned to rapidly exhaust its narrowly restricted sup- 
plies of thought and sentiment ; hence even the wit of 
Moliere, confined within a narrow circle of individuality, 
tends to run into types — Le Misanthrope, Le Grondeur — 
rather than to create a living personality like that of 
Falstaff. Macaulay, comparing Bunyan and Shelley as 
writers who have “given to the abstract the interest of 
the concrete,” observed that “there can be no stronger 
sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than the 
tendency so common among writers of the French school 
to turn images into abstractions, no stronger sign of a 
mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this 
abstracting process and to make individuals out of 
generalities.” But neither Macaulay nor the French 
dramatists seem to have known that individuality depends 
for life and variety on the range of social evolution which 
the artist has within his ken — a range which may be 
limited not only by the degree of evolution actually 
reached in the given group, but also by the proprieties- 
of an elite circle or the restrictions of classical imitation. 

§ 94. For a time it looked as if courtly and classical 

* Cf. Geruzez, His. de la Litt. Fran., vol. ii. pp. 21G, sqq . ; A. W. 
Schlegel, Led. on Dram. Art., lect. xviii. 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


367 


associations were destined to produce a stationary state 
of national literature throughout Europe, and all inspira- 
tion was to be lost by men who had not learned that the 
form of literature cannot live apart from the spirit ; that 
style consists not in mere arrangement of words, but in 
the harmony of thought and speech, and that this har- 
mony is fullest where social life is most widely sym- 
pathetic, while at the same time individual life is most 
profoundly deep. In the masterpieces of Dryden and 
Pope, an age of refined but shallow individualism leaves 
its marks in character-portraits not to be surpassed for 
clearness of outline and boldness of touch ; but, as Emer- 
son has said, “to believe that what is true for you in 
your private heart is true for all men — that is genius,” 
and for such belief the Paris of Boileau offered as little 
scope as the London of Johnson. From the middle of 
the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
turies, personal satire, that witness to weak social sym- 
pathies, rules the literatures of London and Paris. Before 
the belief of which Emerson speaks could become possible 
a new resurrection of the social spirit had to take place — 
Boileau and the court had to be replaced by Rousseau 
and the Revolution. In the towns corporate feelings had 
been chilled in France and England by the shadow of 
the individualising central monarchy; but now the 
manifest disbelief of courtly individualism in itself, as 
well as new commercial and industrial activities, were 
arousing sentiments of personal equality and corporate 
union. It would be clearly impossible within our limits 
to describe the many causes which contributed to create 
democratic individualism side by side with industrial 
socialism— the great conflicting spirits in whom we live 
and move and have our being. Suffice it to say that in 
place of monarchical individualism now grown effete, in 


368 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


place of feudal individualism ousted by central force, 
in place of the narrow socialism of the medieval com- 
munes, came a conflict between personal and social action 
and thought on a scale which the world has never before 
witnessed. Since the close of the eighteenth century 
vast movements of men in masses have strengthened 
more and more the social spirit, have deepened more and 
more, by repulsion where in no other way, the sense of 
individuality. How this return to corporate life, how 
this deepening of individuality, have affected and are 
affecting literature, it would be a life-task to illustrate 
and explain ; we shall here offer only some striking 
examples of their influences. 

In Germany the literary centralism and courtly pro- 
prieties of Paris had found from the first a hazardous 
dominion. Without any definite national centre, and 
containing marked social contrasts in its local govern- 
ments, cities, and feudal nobility, Germany could not 
easily fall in with the stereotyped literary ideas of Paris 
and her recognition of individual life within a very 
special and narrow circle as the only proper domain for 
the literary artist. Besides, what evidence was there, 
after all, that the models of Parisian taste were really 
classical ? The countrymen of Sachs were not long in 
putting this question and answering it for themselves in 
a manner fatal to Parisian pretensions. Hence Lessing’s 
endeavour to establish a truly German drama by criticism 
such as that of his Dramaturgic , and by creation such as 
that of his Minna von Barnlielm , “ the first trulv national 
drama that appeared on the German stage.” Ten years 
later (1773) appeared Gotz von Berlichingen, which dis- 
played German independence not only in a disregard of 
French dramatic rules, but also in finding materials for 
a national drama in the old days of the Biltertlium. 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


369 


Contemporary life and national liistory were thus alike 
expanding the horizon of the literary artist beyond 
Parisian limits. Types of individuality, of social life, not 
admissible within the purlieus of the Parisian theatre, 
were receiving attention ; nay, the very idea of the stage 
as a great moral agent (Schiller’s favourite idea) showed 
the rise of a social spirit totally at variance with Parisian 
taste. We might illustrate the rise of this new spirit in 
such type-characters as Saladin the Mussulman, Nathan 
the Jew, and the Christian Knight-Templar in Lessing’s 
Nathan ; but we prefer to turn to the work of a greater 
than Lessing. 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at Frankfurt am 
Main on the 28th of August, 1749, was no believer in 
social Utopian sucli as the author of the Contrat Social 
might imagine in his State of Nature ; but none the less 
was his a real voice from the new social spirit of 
European life. If the instruments to which he looked 
for the propagation of new doctrines — brotherhoods of 
men of high character and training as described in 
Wilhelm Meister— remind us of the bard-clans which appear 
at the rude beginnings of literary culture, his appreciation 
of Hans Sachs' Poetical Mission * and his abstract or 
allegorical personages in Faust, display deep sympathy 
with that corporate side of human life which since the 
days of the Mysteries had been almost ignored in litera- 
ture. The “Prologue for the Theatre,” in this latter 
famous piece, which, especially in the often unread 
Second Part, contains all the elements of the early 
European drama — sacred personages, allegory, mixture 
of comedy and tragedy, disregard of the unities— con- 

* In this poem Goetho admirably hits off the allegorical spirit of 
Sachs, by introducing the symbolical personages Industry (a maiden with 
a wreath of corn upon her head), and the aged woman who bears indif- 
ferently the names Historia, Mythologia, Fabula. 


370 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


trasts individual and collective life in a manner which 
would seem to mark this contrast as the primary thought 
in Goethe’s mind. “ Speak not to me,” says the Poet 
to the Manager, “ of that motley multitude at whose 
very aspect one’s spirit takes flight ; veil from me that 
undulating throng which sucks us, against our will, into 
the whirlpool.” “ You can only subdue the mass by 
mass,” responds the Manager ; “ each eventually picks 
out something for himself. . • • Consider you have soft 
wood to split ; and only look whom you are writing for.” 
But the Poet is not ready to subject himself to Das 
Gemeine ; “the Poet, forsooth, is to sport away the 
highest right which Nature bestows upon him. By what 
stirs he every heart? Is it not the harmony — which 
bursts from out his breast, and sucks the world back 
again into his heart ? ” A mysterious union of indi- 
vidual with social being, almost worthy of an Oriental 
philosopher-poet ; but Goethe’s Mystery-play is indeed 
throughout the great mystery of individual contrasted 
with social life, the mikrocosm contrasted with that 
makrocosm of corporate unity at whose sign Faust, 
thrilled with rapture, sees “ Nature herself working in 
his soul’s presence.” On which side is Goethe ? Is he 
for the individual mikrocosm, or for the group — the 
makrocosm ? “ It is a great pleasure to transport one’s 

self into the spirit of the times,” says Wagner. “ What 
you term the spirit of the times,” Faust replies, “ is at 
bottom only your own spirit in which the times are 
reflected.” This looks like individualism of Byron’s 
type. But “ before the gate ” moves a world of social 
types — mechanics, servant-girls, students, the townsmen, 
the beggar, the soldier — “ under the gay quickening 
glance of the Spring ; ” and as the “ motley crowd ” 
presses out of the town, “ from the damp rooms of mean 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITER AT URE. 


371 


houses, from the bondage of mechanical drudgery, from 
the confinement of gables and roofs, from the stifling 
narrowness of streets,” Faust, in the gladness of a truly 
social spirit, cries, “ Here is the heaven of the multitude ; 
big and little are huzzaiug joyously ; here I am a man.” 
Not so Mephistopheles — “the devil is an egoist;” not 
so the wretched pedant Wagner, who is an enemy to 
coarseness of every sort,” and hates to see “ people run 
riot as if the devil were driving them, and call it merri- 
ment, call it singing.” Yes, the dominant spirit of Faust 
is social ; and in the Second Part especially the signs of 
corporate and impersonal being come thick upon us — 
in a symbolisation of social progress, in allegorical 
personages such as the four grey women, Want and 
Guilt, Care and Need. But perhaps the true intent of 
Goethe is not to take sides with either the individual or 
the social spirit, but to reconcile their ^pretensions in an 
ideal of practical culture. 

Before the eyes of Victor Hugo some such reconcilia- 
tion seems likewise to loom forth as a grand ideal. His 
best work, like that of Goethe, is impersonal in tone ; his 
ideals are such as an age of social sympathies might 
suggest— Justice, Liberty, Progress. If Hugo is weak 
in individual portraiture, it is because there rises before 
his mind the vast figure of “ Humanity ” in which the 
countless differences of individual being disappear. “ If 
his perception of individual character is ordinarily not 
very exact, some compensation for this lies in his 
abundant sympathy with that common manhood and 
womanhood which is more precious than personal 
idiosyncrasies.” * In Les Chants du Crepuscule , for 
example, “ the individual appears, but his individuality 
is important less for its own sake than because it reflects 
* Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1789-1877, p. 437. 

17 


372 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the common spiritual characteristics of the period.” 
Above all, in La Legende des Siecles we have (as Hugo 
himself tells us in his preface) “an effort to express 
Humanity in a kind of cyclic work, to paint it suc- 
cessively and simultaneously under all the aspects — of 
history, fable, philosophy, religion, science — which unite 
in one immense movement of ascent towards the light ; 
to show in a kind of mirror, dark and clear, that grand 
figure, one and multiple, gloomy and radiant — Man.” 
Contrast this picture of the human race “ considered as 
a grand collective individual accomplishing epoch after 
epoch a series of acts on the earth,” with the picture of 
the world’s past and future offered by a Miracle-play; 
contrast the profound depths of personality in Faust with 
the personages of a Morality-play ; what an expansion 
of social sympathies, what an immense deepening of 
individual consciousness ! 

It would be easy to multiply examples of the social 
spirit as the grand maker of modern literature — the 
Prometheus of Shelley, the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. 
It would be easy to illustrate the union of this social 
spirit with a spirit profoundly individual alike in 
the novels of George Eliot and the poetry of Walt 
Whitman. But our contrast of Faust with the medieval 
drama reminds us that, besides expanded sympathies 
and deepened personality, this social evolution of Europe 
was leaving other marks on its national literatures in 
new aspects of Nature and animal life. The splendid 
descriptions of Nature in Faust— Spring budding as old 
Winter flies to the bleak mountains, the green-girt 
cottages shimmering in the setting sun, the sunrise at 
the opening of the Second Part — contrast strikingly with 
the few bald allusions to Nature in the Mysteries and 
Moralities. Byron calls his Heaven and Earth and his 


MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


373 


Cain “ Mysteries ; ” but not only is his intense indi- 
vidualism, reflected in -that of Cain as of Manfred, utterly 
at variance with the impersonal character of the early 
spectacles, and even fatal to any dramatic capacity by its 
inability to project sympathy beyond self, but the 
descriptions of Nature in these so-called “ Mysteries ” 
distinguish them alike from the rude drama of allegory 
and the mature drama of personal character. In the old 
impersonal drama of England, France, Germany, we have 
few touches of Nature even so slight as the Gossip's Song 
— u the flood comes flitting in full fast ” — in the Chester 
Plays.* In the personal drama, that of Shakspere 
himself, for example, we have only splendid glimpses of 
Nature — the “oak whose antique root peeps out upon 
the brook that brawls along this wood,” or “ yon gray 
lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day ” — as if 
Shakspere felt the open introduction of Nature to be as 
unsuited to his drama as that of the impersonal “ many- 
headed monster.” Byron’s lone Japhet among the rocky 
wilds of the Caucasus lamenting the wave that shall 
engulf the rugged majesty that looks eternal, Byron’s 
painfully individualised Cain watching with Lucifer 
the myriad lights of worlds sweep by in the blue 
wilderness of space as “ leaves along the limped streams 
of Eden,” are almost equally removed from the Mysteries 
and the mature drama. How is it that we find Nature 
socialised on a vast scale in Faust? How is it that we 
find the individual and Nature thus darkly face to face 
in Byron ? It is to these questions that we now propose 
to turn. 


* Edition of Tliomus Wright, p. 53 , 


371 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CHAPTER III. 

NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 

§ 95. In the earliest poetry of Europe, poetry which 
reflects the stormy local life out of which national union 
was to slowly grow, man is too busy with his tribal wars 
and his conflict with rugged Nature to sing of the 
mountains or the forests with any sense of pleasure. In 
Beowulf \ Grendel’s shadow, dark and deadly, “ roams all 
night the misty moors.” When the cruiser “foamy- 
necked ” across the “ wild swan’s path ” has reached the 
glittering cliffs, the Weders thank God “for making 
easy to them the watery way.” For the Scop knows 
nothing J of the glad waters of the dark blue sea or the 
moonlit lakes of later poesy ; he fears the sunset when 
“ dusky night, the shadowing helmet of all creatures, 
lowering beneath the clouds comes gliding on; ” he fears 
“ the haunted waters of the Nixes’ mere*” and gladly 
sees the dawn of “ God’s bright beacon ” in the east. 

Nor is this want of sympathy with Nature confined 
to the poetry of the Sea-Robbers. “ We find no de- 
scription of scenery either in the Nilelungen or the 
Gudrun even where the occasion might lead us to look 
for it. In the otherwise circumstantial account of the 
chase during which Siegfried is murdered, the only 
natural features mentioned are the blooming heather 
and the cool fountain under the linden tree.” In Gudrun, 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


375 


indeed, as Wilhelm Grimm goes on to say, we have such 
slight descriptive touches as the morning star rising over 
the sea glistening in the early dawn ; but, as in the 
Homeric pictures of the island of the Cyclops and the 
gardens of Alkinous, such descriptions of Nature are 
completely subordinated to human interests. Had we any 
truly primitive reliques of Celtic or Teutonic poetry, we 
might find in them Nature-myths, such as those of Hymir 
and Odin and the Jotuns, in which some Carlyle would 
descry for us vast reflections of man’s primitive person- 
ality supposed to be colossal — “ huge Brobdingnag genius 
needing only to be tamed down into Sliaksperes, Dantes, 
Goethes,” as if the diverse personalities of these three 
master-singers could not only be lumped together, but 
might be treated as the personality of a clansman 
“ tamed down.” But Christianity, while absorbing the 
folk-lore of its converts, humanised and, so to speak, 
denaturalised it. Combating the sentiments of clan life 
— Blood-revenge and the like — Christianity was also com- 
pelled to combat pagan worships of Nature and the songs 
in which they were voiced. Inheriting largely from the 
municipal life of Greece and Borne feelings of man’s 
superiority to Nature, disdainful of material existence as 
corrupt and perishable, and now brought into direct con- 
flict with the pagan worship of Nature, the new faith 
could not be expected to perpetuate such poetry of 
Nature. Moreover, each successive wave of barbaric con- 
quest contributed to make these sentiments of Nature a 
kind of savage jungle in which the deities of the pagans 
figured in wild confusion as dragons and monsters more 
readily convertible into the devils of the faithful than 
the lovely forms of classical mythology. Finally, the 
degradation of those clansmen whose communal property 
these sentiments of Nature would have been, must have 


376 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


aided in dethroning the divinities of Nature ; and when 
the free clans had sunk into the serfdom of feudal 
villages, it was less likely than ever that their old songs 
should attract the attention of the monks.* If new sym- 
pathies with Nature were to arise, clearly they must tind 
their source in a material life more hopeful than that of 
feudal serfs, a life in which men might again become in 
some degree joyous pagans pleased with the odours of 
earth-flowers, and not for ever peering through their short- 
lived beauty into the unknown and eternal. 

Such a life of material pleasure was now only possible 
in the feudal castle ; and here, accordingly, the return to 
paganism took place. But this feudal paganism was 
something widely different from either the classical or 
the tribal. A coarsely objective individualism, almost 
equally removed from the individualism of the Alexan- 
drian age, aware of its own pettiness in the presence of 
vast masses of men, and from the clan merger of indi- 
vidual in social being, had now assumed a gigantic and 
almost grotesque significance in the person of the 
seigneur. It might be anticipated that before the eyes 
of this feudal personage Nature, if she attracted attention 
at all, would assume a dress curiously contrasting with 
that which she had worn for the poets of Alexandria or 
the bards of the clan. 

§ 96. Feudal song neither humanises Nature, as the 
Alexandrian had done, nor spiritualises her life — worships 
in her neither the life of man nor that of God. It 
would seem as if Christian associations, without doing 
much to lessen the prodigious self-importance of the 
seigneur, had been able to drive from his halls the 

* On the monks as subduers of Nature’s marshes and forests see 
Montalembert’s Monks of the West. Their conflict with Nature seems 
rather to have confirmed the!. contempt for the material world than 
created any sympathy with Nature’s lifo. 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


377 


awe of Nature’s lasting majesty or the true love of 
her beauty. In the Chansons de Geste and the songs of 
Minnesingers the life of the wandering minstrel could 
not but leave traces of Nature’s influences ; but these 
are seen merely in general allusions, and if among the 
trampling of horses and the baying of hounds, among 
the sights and sounds of the chase or the hawking party, 
we catch a glimpse of “ gentle May,” or the “ dew glisten- 
ing on the heather-bells,” or hear the song of the night- 
ingale, it is only because the feudal scene needs the 
addition of some such prettiness. These feudal singers 
reverse the practice of that prose-poet Bernardin de Saint- 
Pierre, who makes his narratives only frames for his 
pictures of Nature ; they offer us hardly any pictures of 
Nature, little but scattered images (such as the “ fading 
leaves of autumn” or " the fields bared in winter’s snow”), 
which are so frequently and mechanically repeated as to 
suggest anything but lively sympathy with Nature. The 
flower and the leaf are but emblems of war and love to 
them ; as sings Bertran de Born — 

“ Bien me sourit le doux prin temps, 

Qui fait venir fleurs et feuillages ; 

Et bien me plait lorsque j’entends 
Des oiseaux le gentil ramage. 

Mais j’aime mieux quand sur le pre 
Je vois Vetendard arbore, 

Flottant comme un signal de guerre ; 

Quand j’entends par monts et par vaux 
Courir chevaliers et chevaux 
Et sous leurs pas fremir la terre.’’ 

German critics have asked whether contact with 
Southern Italy, with Asia Minor and Palestine by the 
Crusades, enriched the feudal poetry of Germany with 
new imagery drawn from more sunny climes, and have 
decided in the negative. The question suggests one 
reason for the weak and stereotyped sentiments of Nature 


378 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


in feudal poetry. Modern science has gifted the literary 
artist with thoughts of Nature’s unity, in which all indi- 
vidual and social distinctions lose themselves — are “made 
one witli Nature;” but the narrowly local assoc ; ations 
of feudal life prevented even the coarsest sense of Nature’s 
unity. Only local aspects of Nature — those of their own 
neighbourhood — could have presented any charm for the 
seigneur and his retainers; and even these, far from 
being gilded with any halo like the local divinities of 
Hellas, were spoiled by associations of villeinage. The 
fields were for the serfs to till; the forest glades were 
beautiful only as the haunts of the deer. The Chanson de 
Boland might offer many an opportunity for descriptions 
of the Pyrenees, but what pleasure would a glowing 
picture of the Valley of Roncevaux have afforded the 
audience of a castle hall? Would they, who cared for 
Nature even round their walls only as the purveyor of 
the chase, have listened to descriptions, however beautiful, 
of a place they had never seen ? No ; the feudal minstrel 
suited his lyre to the common feelings of his feudal 
audiences ; and, if he sang of Nature at all, only intro- 
duced her general features, without aiming at truth of 
local description or even variety of expression, and even 
these general touches as mere adjuncts of feudal life — 
“ the greyhounds glancing through the groves,” and " bow- 
men bickering on the bent.” 

Still feudal life and the poetry it created are by no 
means to be overlooked in the development of our European 
sentiments of Nature. Such images of Nature as are 
scattered through feudal songs, though only taken to 
throw into greater relief the charms of a mistress or the 
pleasures of the chase, are at least in the main truthful. 
It was something to have freed Nature from the load of 
tangled myths under which early barbarism had buried 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


379 


her. It was something to have risen above Christian 
anathemas of the material world even so far as to find 
the figures of lord and lady, horse and hound and hawk, 
more beautiful among the flowers of May and the singing 
birds. Nature is plainly assuming forms more friendly 
than were known to the kinsmen of Beowulf when they 
gladly saw “the Father loosen the bonds of frost,” or 
“ drove their roaring vessels over the mists of the floods.” 
But this feudal sentiment of Nature is narrow in the 
extreme, socially and physically. “Among the Trouba- 
dours,” says M. Fauriel, “ we shall seek in vain for the 
least picture, false or true, of the country-folks’ condition. 
These Theocriti of the castle know nothing of labourers, 
herdsmen, flocks, the fields, the harvest, the vintage ; 
they have the air of never having seen brook and river, 
forest and mountain, village and hut. For them the 
pastoral world is reduced to lonely shepherdesses guard- 
ing some sheep, or not guarding them at all ; and the 
adventures of this pastoral w r orld are limited to conversa- 
tions of these shepherdesses with the Troubadours who, 
riding by, never fail to see them and quickly dismount to 
offer their gallant addresses.” How shall the life of Nature 
be observed from a broader and loftier platform than that 
of the feudal castle ? How shall her immense variety of 
forms oust the stereotyped Nature-language of feudal 
song? What social expansion, what individual deepen- 
ing of man’s spirit, shall reveal in Nature sights and sounds 
not known before ? 

§ 97. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries 
we may watch three great influences at work in creating 
new ideas of Nature in Europe — the rise of the towns, 
the progress of geographical discovery, and the Renais- 
sance. At first, indeed, the rise of the towns did not 
rouse any Jively sympathies with Nature. The armed 


380 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


burghers of the Commune , seeing few hut enemies beyond 
their walls, viewed the scenery of the country with much 
the same feelings as those of the old Greek town-republics. 
But, in spite of confining men’s interest within the city 
walls at first, the towns of Europe were destined to 
expand directly and indirectly our modern sentiments of 
Nature. Their commerce, bringing back knowledge of 
new climates, animals, vegetation, gave currency to new 
ideas, new contrasts, of Nature ; and the various types of 
character developed within their walls diversified the 
human standpoints from which Nature might be per- 
ceived. The soul of the free burgher, filled with new 
sights and sounds, was soon capable of adding much to the 
songs of feudalism. At the court of the monarch burgher 
and feudal elements could find a quiet union. Here, 
then, we might have expected to find a true poetry of 
Nature springing up. But the Latin and Greek Kenais- 
sances were to make our European poetry of Nature an 
exotic cared of courts before it became a home-growth of 
democratic taste. 

The fantastic geography of the Divina Commedia has 
too little to do with the world of Nature to admit truthful 
and sympathetic pictures of her forms. The individualism 
of Dante’s town-born muse leaves as few signs of Nature’s 
handiwork as the town-drama of Athens. Here and there 
we meet descriptive touches — “ il tremolar di marina,” * 
“la divina foresta spessa e viva ; ” f but even in the pine- 
forests on the shore of Chiassi we hear echoes from 
Vergil — 

“ Tal, qnal di ramo in ramo si raccoglie 
Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi, 

Quand’ Eolo Seirocco fuor discioglie.” 

If we turn to Petrarch expecting to find natural de- 
* II Purgatorio , i XI 7. t Hid., xxviii. 2. 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


381 


scription as a fitting frame for human love-scenes, we shall 
be disappointed ; for, though we may admire the Italian 
stylist’s sonnet on the effects of the Valley of Vaucluse 
upon his feelings after Laura’s death, he sympathises 
rather with city life and classical reminiscences than with 
the splendid life of Nature round about him. “I miss 
with astonishment,” says Humboldt,* “ any expression of 
feeling connected with the aspects of Nature in the 
letters of Petrarch, either when, in 1315, he attempted the 
ascent of Mont Ventour from Vaucluse, longing to catch 
a glimpse of his native land, or when he visited the gulf 
of Bake, or the banks of the Rhine to Cologne. His 
mind was occupied by classical remembrances of Cicero 
and the Roman poets, or by the emotions of his ascetic 
melancholy, rather than by surrounding Nature.” 

This was while the Greek revival had scarcely yet 
begun ; no wonder that when the models which Rome 
had essayed to copy were unveiled before the eyes of 
Western scholars, their faces were averted from all sights 
and sounds of Nature save such as their classical gods — 
for gods indeed the classical artists now became — had 
stamped with approval. The beauties of the physical 
world exist only for him who can see them; and when 
the exquisite but delusive mirage of classical associations 
stole over the face of Western Europe, men of culture 
came to see Nature — nay, even social and individual life 
— through mists in which nothing loomed out clearly save 
the phantom men and manners of Athens and Rome. 
“For long the only forests or seas, gardens or fields, 
frequented by poets, w^ere to be found in the descriptions 
of Vergil and Homer. In France, at least down to the 
time of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, the 
only voyages made by men of letters, the only storms 

* Cosmos, Poetic Descriptions of Nature, note 82. 


382 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


and shipwrecks with which they were acquainted, were 
those of Ulysses and iEneas ” * Even in Chaucer we 
find the conventional garden of the Italian or Provencal 
muse rather than the landscape of England. Not only 
does Chaucer know nothing of Nature in the Words- 
worthian sense — for his allegories and types bespeak an 
age in which there was no profound individualism capable 
of feeling ‘‘the silence and the calm of mute insensate 
things” — but his merely animal enjoyment of her beauty 
prefers colourless generalities to local truth ; he would, 
perhaps, have shrunk as little from transplanting Italian 
scenery into England as from making Duke Theseus an 
English noble, just as Shakspere sets the London guilds 
in Athens, and places lions in the forest of Arden. t 

Just when the resurrection of Greek thought was 
beginning to send forth scholars bound hand and foot in 
the grave-clothes of antiquity, while mental freedom, 
fostered by growing towns and decaying feudalism, sought 
to clothe itself in classical dress so as to escape the 
censure of Christian dogma — an excuse for much of the 
Renaissance pedantry — voyages of discovery in the East 
and West spread new ideas of Nature’s handiwork in 
distant climes. From the letters of Columbus and his 
ship’s journal we may feel the overpowering amazement 
with which the navigator gazed on impenetrable forests, 
“where one could scarcely distinguish which were the 
flowers and leaves belonging to each stem,” palms “ more 
beautiful and loftier than date trees,” “ rose-coloured 
flamingoes fishing at the mouths of rivers in the early 
dawn.” “Once,” he tells us, “I came into a deeply 
enclosed harbour, and saw high mountains which no 


* Victor de Laprade, Le Sent, de la Nat. Chez les Mod., p. 57. 
t Cf. M. Browne, Chaucer's England, vol. i. pp. 210, sqq.; vol. ii. 


pp. 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


383 


human eye had seen before, mountains with lovely waters 
streaming down. Firs and pines and trees of various 
form, and beautiful flowers, adorned the heights. Ascend- 
ing the river which poured itself into the bay, I was 
astonished at the cool shade, the crystal-clear water, the 
number of singing birds. It seemed as if I never could 
quit a spot so delightful — as if a thousand tongues would 
fail to describe it — as if the spell-bound hand would refuse 
to write.” 

Here were materials for Chateaubriands and Lamar- 
tines, yet, excepting the great national epic of Portugal,* 
the influences of the new discoveries on literature as 
distinct from science were not very remarkable. It has 
been observed that Camoens, like Lucretius, gives us a 
picture of the water-spout ; and no doubt his “ cloud of 
woven vapour whirling round and round and sending 
down a thin tube to the sea” is at least as graphic as the 
Roman’s “ column reaching down from heaven to ocean.” 
Hut, though Camoens tauntingly bids the learned “ try 
to explain the wonderful things hidden from the world,” 
the spirit of Lucretius was abroad. Before the poet’s 
life closed (1579) Bacon was eighteen years of age; and 
that “ experience,” which against “so-called science” he 
had praised as “the sailor’s only guide,” was on its way 

♦ “ The JEneid ” says Hallam {Lit., vol. ii. p. 205), “ reflects the glory 
of Rome as from a mirror ; the Lusiad is directly and exclusively what 
its name (‘ The Portuguese/ Os Lusiadas ) denotes, the praise of the 
Lusitanian people. Their past history chimes in, by means of episodes, 
with the great event of Gama’s voyage to India.” Having made an 
exception in favour of the Lusiad , we must remind the reader that ocean 
and Indian scenery by no means banish conventional personification of 
Nature under classical figures. Venus and the Nereids save the fleet; 
Bacchus delivers a speech to the assembled gods of the sea ; and Neptune 
in true Vergilian fashion bids JEoluslet loose the winds on the Portuguese 
fleet. But contrast the absence of scenery in Ariosto and Tasso, and wo 
shall admit with M. Laprade that the Lusiad “ est lo plus ancien monu- 
ment de noire poesie chretienne oil la nature tienne une grande place et 
joue un role independant ” (Le Sent, de la Nat. Chez les Mod., p. 73). 


384 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


to be systematised. Independent inquiry readily sought 
an outlet in studies which at first wore the look of being 
unconnected with dogma ; and, in spite of Bacon’s imagi- 
native style, the disciples of experience began to separate 
science from literature as if they possessed no bond in 
that imaginative element without which experience is 
a dead thing. Literature, too, just now becoming the 
toy of courts, without sorrow surrendered to science a 
study of Nature which would not only have limited the 
freedom of romance, but bred dissatisfaction with the 
scenic models of Theocritus and Vergil. It was through 
classical spectacles that the culture of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries preferred to see Nature ; and it 
was just in their sentiments of Nature that classical 
literatures, as already explained, were weakest. More- 
over, such sentiments of nature as classical literature had 
possessed were likely to be gravely misinterpreted by 
Christian imitators. The pastoral elegy of Modern Europe 
is a striking evidence of this misinterpretation. The 
essence of the Greek pastoral elegy is the contrast of 
mail’s individual life with Nature’s apparent eternity — a 
melancholy sentiment becoming the lips of a modern 
materialist, but in the author of Lycidas, the poetic 
champion of a faith before which the material universe 
is but as dust and ashes compared with the soul of the 
veriest wretch who wears the form of man, almost 
grotesquely out of place. Why should Nature lament 
the escape of a divinity greater than herself from its 
clay prison ? The Greek chorus in the social life of the 
Hebrews speaking the Puritanism of England in Samson 
Agonistes is not a stranger union of incongruities than the 
poet of individual immortality repeating the materialism 
of the Greek in lamentations for Edward King. Plainly 
the individualism of the sixteenth and seventeenth 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


3S5 


centuries did not know whether it was of earth or the 
infinite ; and this confused judgment made it willing to 
look on Nature partially as a beautiful machine, its 
exquisite mechanism worthy of such word-pictures as 
L' Allegro and 11 Penseroso contain, partially as a pagan 
god to be duly invoked only in good old pagan fashion, 
and partially as a perishable nullity destined to be “ rolled 
together as a scroll ” — in any case connected by no pro- 
foundly real links with man’s social and individual life. 

§ 98. “ If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to 
take this idea along with us, that the pastoral is an image 
of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to 
describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, 
but as they may be conceived then to have been, when 
the best of men followed the employment. To carry 
this resemblance yet farther, it would not be amiss to 
give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as 
it may be useful to that sort of life.” So thought and 
wrote Alexander Pope in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. 
Yet v r ko would look for genuine sympathy with Nature 
from the poet of court intrigues, personal satire, well- 
bred criticism, and a mongrel Nature in which Sicilian 
muses sing on the banks of the Thames, and our Theocritean 
acquaintances, Daphnis and the rest, repeat the similes 
of the Greek in correct English couplets ? Who could 
expect such sympathy from the disciple of a poet who 
in his Passage die Bhin is more troubled by the insertion 
of ugly names (“ Quel vers ne tomberait au seul nom de 
Heusden ? ”) than the description of Nature, and mistakes 
lifeless symbols like “Rhine, leaning with one hand 
propped upon his urn,” or the classical Naiades, for the 
fresh inspiration of Nature ? 

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the artifi- 
cial poetry of courts did nothing for Nature but surround 


386 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


her with the extinct flocks of Pan, the long-withered fruits 
of Pomona, and the ancient charms of the elderly but ever- 
blushing Flora. It was in courtly literature that shallow 
individualism began to understand itself, and worked 
out to their bitterest disenchantment all the pleasures 
of which its “palace of art ” was capable. The ferocious 
misanthropy of Swift is the spirit of this individualism 
in the act of violent suicide ; the tame cynicism of 
Voltaire is this same spirit dying of old age, though 
wearing still the garlands of a vanished youth. Men, in 
the poetry of Allan Kamsay and Thomson, Klopstock, 
Saint Lambert, began to see that Nature without court 
dress was none the less beautiful; that there were myriads 
of her sights and sounds which the restricted and now 
effete individualism of courts had never freely experi- 
enced; that of “this fair volume which we World do 
name ” they had been too long content with “ coloured 
vellum, leaves of gold, fair dangling ribbons,” or, at most, 
“ some picture on the margin wrought.” At first, indeed, 
simple truthfulness of description, such as may be found 
plentifully in Cowper’s poems, marked the change from 
classical and courtly idealism into open-air freedom ; but 
soon the sentiment of Nature was to become somethin^ 

O 

infinitely deeper than any description, however accurate, 
however beautiful, could express. 

Democratic revolution, with its vast masses of men in 
action, with its theoretic obliteration of all individual in- 
equalities, and its consequent readiness to imagine human 
life as impersonal — a readiness to be increased by scientific 
ideas of physical laws likewise impersonal — now* came to 
force into intense conflict ideas of individual and collective 
humanity. Individualism, feeling trampled underfoot in 
the rush of multitudes, turned to Nature in search of 

• u Jardins lumineux, plaines d’aepliodele 
Que n’ont 'point Joules les humciins.” 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 3S7 

One aspect of this newly roused individualism is to be 
seen in Byron and his imitators throughout Europe — an 
aspect which unites all the self-importance of a feudal 
seigneur with a real or affected despair of human happi- 
ness such as monastic asceticism alone can rival. Another 
aspect of it may be seen in Shelley’s substitute of 
spiritual pautheism for individual immortality. In 
Shelley, personality knows its own weakness in the face of 
the physical world, knows its weakness as but one drop in 
the vast Hood of humanity, and is willing to come dow*n 
from feudal isolation, to mix in the democratic crowds, to 
merge itself in that spirit of Nature which know s neither 
personal nor social distinctions — 

“ lie is made one with Nature. There is heard 
His voice in all her music, from the moan 

Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird.” 

But this negation of self, expressing itself in abstractions 
as intensely realised as they are delicately beautiful, makes 
Shelley’s sentiment of Nature less profound than that of 
Wordsworth. Neither in the presence of his fellow-men, 
whatever their myriad march, nor of Nature, how countless 
soever her worlds, can the indestructible personality of 
Wordsworth forget itself. His spirit, like that of Shelley, 
is divine; but it is no mere fragment of a vast divinity; 
backwards into the illimitable past, forwards into the 
illimitable future, now and for ever in the face of man 
and Nature, it dwells, has dwelt, shall dwell like a star 
apart in an individuality unmade, unmakable, unchange- 
able. Before this profound sense of personality, partially 
Platonic, partially Christian, but most of all awakened by 
the physical and social conditions of the poet’s age, 
Nature assumes a depth of meaning which only beings 
of Wordsworthian mould may feel. Byron’s descriptive 
powers, Shelley’s musical communion with the sounds of 


388 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


Nature, give place to a realisation of Nature’s being all 
the more terribly significant because the observer refuses 
to reconcile its conflict with his own personality either by 
material or immaterial unity ; and while the associations 
of his childhood, youth, and age become consecrated as 
the earthly dress of an eternal being — not the melancholy 
entirety of one made of such stuff as dreams are made 
of — Wordsworth fears not to be materialised by the 
companionship of Nature, because he has neither deified 
her being at the expense of his own, nor denied her 
divinity in order to make himself eternal. 

§ 99. When, therefore, we ask, as we have already 
asked, why it is that in the “mysteries” of Goethe and 
Byron deep feelings of personality, deep sympathies with 
Nature, strikingly contrast with the impersonal allegories 
and absence of Nature in the early drama of Modern 
Europe, we find our answer in the social and individual 
evolution of European life — in the expansion of social life, 
in the deepening of individuality winning new senses of 
sight and hearing, as it were, for the lights and shades, 
the murmuring inarticulate voices of Nature — 

“ Voix fecondes, voix du silence 
Dont les lieux deserts sont peuple's.” 

Social sympathies, individual consciousness, Nature’s life, 
all on a scale of greatness never before approximated, seem 
to meet in a poet of that great Western Republic whose 
teeming population is indeed “ not merely a nation, but a 
nation of nations.” In America, says Walt Whitman, 
“there is something in the doings of man that corre- 
sponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night ; ” 
in America, more than in the old countries of Europe, far 
more than in the stationary East, there is “ action mag- 
nificently moving in vast masses ; ” in America, too, this 
largeness of Nature and the nation of nations “ were 


NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE. 


389 


monstrous without a corresponding largeness and gene- 
rosity of the spirit of the citizen.” For Whitman the 
ideal individual of America — America’s ideal man — is to 
absorb into his soul an almost boundless range of social 
life — all the sights and sounds of Nature and animals ; 
“ his spirit responds to his country’s spirit ; he incarnates 
its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes — 
Mississippi w r ith annual freshets and changing chutes, the 
blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Mary- 
land, the growths of pine and cedar and cypress and 
hickory, forests coated with transparent ice, and icicles 
hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind.” * 
There is a strange magnificence in this democratic 
individualism, so prodigious in its width and depth — in 
the social sympathies, in the personal consciousness of 
equality, in the fellowship with Nature’s mighty life, of 
these democratic “ comrades, there in the fragrant pines 
and the cedars dusk and dim.” Far indeed have they 
passed from the comradeship of the clan, far from the 
citizenship of the city commonwealth, far from the castes 
of the East, far from the communes and seigneurs of the 
West; yet they feel not wholly disunited with the 
“ garnered clusters of ages, that men and women like them 
grew up and travelled their course and passed on.” 

• Preface to Leaves of Grass. 


390 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


CONCLUSION. 

§ 100. Here, at an effort perhaps uncouth, certainly in 
form but rudely rhythmical, to gather into song all that 
Nature on a scale stupendous, social life in forms most 
various, individuality most profound because realised as 
distinct from all groups and all Nature’s wonders, we 
close our task. Very imperfectly have we essayed to 
follow the effects of social and individual evolution on 
literature from the rudest beginnings of song down to 
the poetry of the great Western Kepublic. We have 
but glanced at the progress of prose in place of those 
metrical forms which in the absence of writing supplied 
supports for the memory ; the influence of conversation 
public and private — its character largely depending on 
the forms of social communion in which men meet — on 
such progress in the East and West; the influence of 
individualised thinking, of philosophy, in fact, upon the 
form and spirit of prose in Athens and Home and Modern 
Europe. We have omitted the varying aspects of animal 
life as reflected in the literatures of different countries 
and climates. We have omitted the comparison of satire 
in different social conditions, though we willingly allow 
that “ there is no outward expression, be it in literature, 
sculpture, painting, or any other art, which more openly 
tells of a nation’s character and exhibits it to all eyes 
than caricature ” — not that all satire is caricature, but, 
like caricature, it is a negative index to an ideal con- 


CONCLUSION. 


391 


scionsly or unconsciously upheld. In fine, want of room 
has also forced us to omit the development of criticism as 
itself illustrating the influences of social and individual 
evolution on literary ideals. To reduce the immense 
study which we have named Comparative Literature 
within the compass of a handy volume without losing 
completeness and minuteness of detail, it would be need- 
ful to separate the descriptive from the scientific treat- 
ment of literature. But to devote an introductory work 
like the present to the scientific treatment alone, would 
not only cut away many interesting illustrations, but 
convey an altogether false impression of the study as bare 
and uninviting. If, in spite of our willingness to sacrifice 
completeness to attractiveness, our readers should carry 
away this unpleasant impression, the fault is certainly in 
the writer and not in his subject. 

Another word of apology may be also needed. It 
will be clear to any reader of this book that its author is 
far from regarding literature as the mere toy of stylists, 
far from advocating the “ moral indifference ” of art. In 
his eyes literature is a very serious thing, which can 
become morally indifferent only in ages of moral indiffer- 
ence. “Let the world go its way, and the kings and 
the peoples strive, and the priests and philosophers 
wrangle ; at least to make a perfect verse is to be out of 
time, master of all change, and free of every creed.” * 
Such was Gautier’s view ; but it is stamped false by the 
whole history of literary development. Whether men 
like it or not, their literary efforts at ideal beauty in 
prose or verse must involve ideals of human conduct. 
Action, speech, and thought are too subtly interwoven to 
allow their artistic severance aught but fancied truth; 
if it were otherwise, literature might indeed have been 
* Dowden, Studies in Literature , 1789-1877, p. 401. 


392 


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. 


the product of a Cloud-cuckoo-town in which historical 
science and morality would be equally out of place. But, 
it may be said, your science cuts at the roots of moral 
conduct by treating the individual as made by conditions 
over which he has no control. Far from it. Our science 
traces a growth of social and individual freedom so far as 
the conditions of human life have hitherto allowed them 
to grow together. Nothing is really gained for morality 
or religion by assuming that the life with which they 
deal is unlimited, unconditioned ; nay, such limitless 
pretensions have hitherto proved very fatal to morality 
by fostering suicidal extremes of social and individual 
thinking. How are these suicidal extremes to be best 
kept in check ? By insisting on the individual and 
social, physical, and the physiological limits within which 
man moves and has moved ; by answering the admirers 
of universal shadows, in which morality itself becomes 
shadowy, in the words of the Hebrew prophet : “ Who 
hath heard such a thing ? What hath seen such things ? 
Shall a land bring forth in a day ? or a people be born 
in a moment ? ” 





INDEX 


The numbers refer to the pages. 


A 

‘Abd Yaghfith, 143, 146 
Abu Tammam, 133 
Academy, French, 343, 344 
Accius, 231 

Achilles, shield of, 105, 122 
Adonis, 106, 109 
iEschines, 204 

iEscliylus, Persians of, 33 ; charac- 
ter-drawing of, 60; his drama 
reflects early social life of Athens, 
206 sqq. ; his moral teaching, 
211 ; 190, 327, 333, 364 
Agathon, 212, 363 
Alcmus, 104 
Aleman, 255 

Alexandrian, Library, 173 ; life, 
260, 261 ; as treated by Shak- 
spere, 30 

Al-Hariri, 13, 183, 237 
Allegorical personages, 216, 218, 
221, 224, 226, 354 sqq., 369 sqq. 
Ambarvalia, 115 sqq. 

Ancestor worship, Chinese, 297 
Antar, 139, 147 

Apollo, Delian, hymn to, 109, 110 
Apollonius Rhodius, 255, 261 
Arabs, early poetry of, 97, 133 sqq. ; 
materialism of, 137 ; chivalry of, 
139 ; language of, 237 
Aramaic language and thought, 
278 


Aranyakas, 298 
Aratus, 251, 261 
Archilochus, 181, 263 
Argo, story of the, 99 note 
Ariosto, 311, 363 

Aristophanes, Hades of, 189 sqq. ; 
criticises Euripides and iEschy- 
lus, 209-211; individualism of, 
212; chorus of, 214; character- 
types of, 215 sqq., 247 ; 258, 
333 

Aristotle, 10, 16, 34, 171, 246, 248, 
252 sqq., 266 

Arnold, Matthew, 41, 79, 229 note, 
260, 324, 343, 344 
Arrow-dance, 119 

Art, and historical truth, 177 sqq . ; 
want of, in early Athens, 200; 
supposed indifferentism of, 391 
Arval Brothers, song of the, 1 14 sqq. 
Aryans, Indian, primitive type of, 
289 sqq. 

Asiatic Society of Bengal, Journal 
of, 134, 140, 148, 150 
Atellanae, Fabulse, 196, 221, 222 
Athenseus, 105 

Athens ; old village life of Attica, 
172, 181 ; literary beginnings of, 
183 sqq. ; contrasted with Rome, 
173 

Authorship, impersonal, 103, 111, 
113, 114, 127, 129, 205, 352 sqq. 
Autos Sacramentales, 31, 218 


394 


INDEX. 


B 

Babylonian influences on Hebrew 
mind, 27G 
Bacchylides, 112 
Bacon, 75, 383, 381 
Bayard, 139 

Bazin, M., 15, 31, 45, 121, 319, 321 
note, 322 
Beast-epic, 1G7 
Bedouin character, 14S, 119 
Benu Shevban, 151 
Beowulf, 131, 143, 189, 347, 374, 
379 

Bergk, 106 
Beritli, 108, 235, 277 
Berkeley, 59 
Bhanrs, 311 
Bhavabhuti, 1G, 313 
Biography, 23, 2G5 
Bion, 118 note , 239, 25G, 324 
Blackic, Professor, 2G7 
Blech, Dr., 1G7 
Boileau, 13, 80, 3G7, 385 
Bolingbroke, 80 
Born, Bertran de, 377 
Brahmanas, 298 
Brahmans. rise of, 289 
Brandt, Sebastian, 355 
Brooke, Stopford, 13 
Brown, Dr., 97 
Browning, Robert, 131 
Brucheium, 253 
Buchheim, Dr., 39 
Buddha, 27G, 302 sqq, 

Builinas , 85 
Bunyan, 36G 
Burckhardt, 137 
Burnouf, M., 118 
Byron, 53, 370, 372, 373, 387 


O 

Calderon, 34, 21G, 218 
Callimachus, 2G1, 2G3 
Calsabigi, 343, 344 
Calverley, 259 
Camoens, 383, 384 
Campbell, 40 
Carlyle, 27, 28, 154, 375 
Caste, 56, 289 ; musician-castes, 111; 
priest-castes, literature of, 1G0, 


193; origin of Indian, 293 sqq . ; 
355 

Cato, 195 

Cattle, in early social life, 2S9 
Catullus, 101, ‘118 note, 2G1 
Celtic, fosterage, 129 ; genealogical 
poems, 158 
Centaur, the, 213 
Centralism, literary, 343 sqq., 3G4 
Chaoremon, 212, 213, 3G3 
Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 199 sqq., 
325 sqq. 

Chansons de Geste, 4G, 134, 347, 377, 
378 

Chateaubriand, 89, 243, 381 
Chaucer, character-types of, G9, 
229 note, 355; Italian influences 
in, 79 ; metres of, 225 ; his treat- 
ment of Nature, 382 
Chinese, lyric, 12; prose-verse, 13; 
theatre, 15, 199, 207, 251, 313, 
318 sqq. ; drama, introduced to 
Europe an scholars, 75 ; symbolic 
dance, 121; criticism, 121, 122, 
211 ; want of “ epic ” poetry, 159, 
220, 309; sentiment of Nature, 
240, 296; odes contrasted with 
Indian hymns, 295 sqq. ; drama, 
European authorities on, 321 note 
Chcerilus, 204 
Chorodidaskalos, 112 
Chorus, 34, GO, 362 ; Japanese, 199, 
200 ; prominence of, in Attic 
drama, 202 sqq., 205 ; how related 
to social life, 205 sqq., 208 sqq. ; 
in comedy, 213 sqq. ; choral song, 
of Dacotahs, 102; Spartan, 106; 
of Elis, 107 ; of marriage, 108, 
109; choral dance-song, 123 
Christianity, 66, 286, 2S7 
Cicero, 195, 252, 261, 263 
City Commonwealth, and Nature, 
54; Athens, the type of, 172; 
definition of, 175; drama in, 
198 sqq. 

Clan, ethics of, 61, 63, 64 ; nature 
of, 90, 92, 94 sqq. ; group at roots 
of literary growth, 94, 97 ; choral 
song of, 110; life-view of, 130; 
personal poetry of, 131, 132; 
spirit in Rome and Athens, 197 ; 
devotion of, 150; sentiment of 


INDEX. 


395 


Nature, 162 sqq. ; liability, 97 ; 
song, 101 sqq. ; 58, 65, 113 

Cleon, 217 

Clergy, Christian, in ancient Borne, 
32 

Clough, A. H., 49 note 

Coleridge, S. T., 11, 26, 27, 34, 42, 
43, 86 

Columbus, 3S2, 3S3 

Comedy, Attic, rise of, 214 sqq . ; 
steps into the shoes of tragedy, 
218; later, 247 sqq. 

Communism, Platonic, 246; Hebrew, 
270 

Comparative method, nature of, 73 ; 
in study of literature, 82 ; de- 
velopment of, in modern Europe, 
75, 76, 93 

Conington, Professor, 189 

Coriolanus, 27, 29, 32 

Corneille, 344, 365 

Courts, influence of, on literature, 
82 

Cowper, 386 

Criticism, Chinese, 15 ; Indian, 16, 
313 ; Chinese and Indian con- 
trasted, 45, 319 ; critic and artist, 
178, 179 


D 

Dance, symbolic, 102, 120 sqq. ; 104, 
117, 119, 127 
Daniel, book of, 276, 277 
Dante, 28 ; individualism of, 69, 
361, 380 ; Be Eloquio Vulgari , 
74 ; 272, 333, 287 
Dasas, 289 

Davis, Sir J. F., 45, 254, 319, 321 
note 

Demetrius Phalereus, 253 
Demogeot, 79 

Demosthenes, 182, 204, 244 
De Betz, 258 
Description, graphic, 328 
Didactic poetry, 19 note ; purpose 
of Chinese drama, 331 
Diocletian, edict of, 267 
Dionysius, 195 
Dissen, 258 
Bjelawy , 138 


Domitian, 261 
Donaldson, 9 

Dowden, Professor, 69, 371, 391 
Drama, an index to social life, 31. 
212, 227, 310, 358, 364, 366; 
Indian, and Nature, 55, 314 sqq . ; 
elements of, in choral song, 109, 
110; ill symbolic dance, 120, 121 ; 
Victor Hugo on, 153; beginnings 
of Boman, 196 ; Athenian and 
Japanese, compared, 199, 204; 
origin of Attic, 202; develop- 
ment of personality reflected in, 
203 sqq. ; Boman and Indian 
contrasted, 232 ; Greek and 
Indian contrasted, 309; Indian 
and Chinese, contrasted, 331, 334; 
historical, 356, 357 ; Menander’s, 
compared with Indian and 
Chinese, 251; Indian, 304 sqq . ; 
Chinese, origin of, 318 ; dra- 
matic form in ancient Indian 
hymn, 290, 292, 304 
Dryden, 26, 80, 367, 


E 

Earle, 250 

Egyptian paradise, 145 
Eiresione , 107 
Eliot , George , 372 
Embateria, 110 
Emerson, 367 
Empedocles, 14, 256 
Ennius, 231 

“Epic,” definition of, 42; deriva- 
tion of, 44 ; poetry of medieval 
France, 101 ; Victor Hugo on, 
153; beginnings of, 158, 159; 
Boman want of materials for, 195 
220; Indian, 305 sqq. ; 312, 313; 
no Chinese, 309 
Epigram, 266 
Epitapliios , 109 
Eponyms, 166 
Essenes, 246, 2S3 
Euemerus, 231 
Eumolpids, 111 

Euripides, his chorus, 60, 210 ; Ion 
of, 180; individualism in his 
plays, 209 sqq., 230, 231 ; criti- 


18 


396 


INDEX. 


cisetl by Aristophanes, 217 ; 190, 
203, 206, 362, 365 
Ewald, 275 

Ezekiel, on inherited guilt, 64, 65, 
230, 269, 280; socialism of, 131, 
270; 180, 187, 270 sqq.; 274, 
275, 278, 284, 287, 303 
Ezra, 276, 282 

F 

Faerie Queene, 15 

Family, Shakspere’s Roman, 32; 
development of, at Rome, 192 
sqq . ; effect of Roman, on drama, 
228 ; effect of Chinese, on drama, 
332 

Fauriel, M., 379 
Feudalism. 340, 376 sqq. 

Finite, philosophy of the, 392 
Flach, Dr. Hans, 104, 110 
Fosterage, literary, 129 
France, influence of, on England, SO 
Freeman, 339 

Future life and clan age, 96 
G 

Gamier, 3S5 

Gautier, 391 

Gefolge, 67, 97, 139 

Geruzez, 43, 366 

Ghosts on Chinese stage, 333 

Gibbon, 93 

Gobineau, 312 

Goethe, 11, 19, 49, 68, 78, 135, 177, 
303, 327, 334, 341, 368, 369 sqq., 
388 

Grammatical criticism, 237 
Gray, 14, 123 
“ Great-man theory,” 85 
Greek, metres in English and Ger- 
man, 49 ; Alexandrian, 42 ; con- 
tempt for comparative inquiry, 
74 

Grimm, Jacob, 167 
Grimm, Wilhelm, 375 
Grosier, 25 

Group, social expansion of, 77, 81, 
90, 235, 244 ; nature of, 91 
Gubernatis, 167 
Gudrun, 374 


Guilds and literature, 353, 355 
Guizot, 131, 132, 304 
Gymnopxdia. 103 

H 

Hades, growth of the conception of, 
187 sqq . ; of Ezekiel, 271 sqq. 
Hallam, 4, 5, 42, 383 
Hamdseh, 133, 134, 138, 150, 151 
Hamlet, 28 

Hase, Dr. Karl, 358 sqq. 

Hebrew, dance-song, 124, 125; com- 
munism, 246 ; and Alexandrian 
Greeks, 276 sqq . ; Helleuised, 
279, 282 ; woman, 25 ; literature 
contrasted with Greek, 98 
Hegel, 276 
Heine, 267 
Henriade, 43 
Herder, 276, 345 
Hesiod, 54, 66, 109, 255 
Hexameter, origin of, 106 
Hogarth, 345 

Homer, women of, 25 ; Nature in, 
54 ; Homeric poems imply ad- 
vanced social evolution, 99 ; 
social life in, 100 ; question of 
authorship, 159, 160; and Pei- 
sistratids, 182; compared with 
Indian “ epics,” 308, 309 
Homeridx, 50, 112 
Horace, Carmen Sxculare, 115 ; 262, 
264 

Hueffer, 101 

Hugo, Victor, 11, 34, 50, 68, 78, 
152, 155,371 
JI amanitas, 230 
Humboldt, 162, 267 note , 381 
Humenaios, 108 
Hunter, 289 
Huzailian poems, 133 

I 

Ialemus song, 106 
I bn Klialdoun, 148 
Idyll , nature of, 240, 259 ; home of, 
257, 258 

“ Ignorance,” age of, 78 
Igor, song of, 84 


INDEX. 


397 


Imagination, nature of, 212 
Imitation literature, 83, 222, 221 
note. 

Impersonal poetry, G8, GO 
Indian, “epics,” 159; criticism, 16, 
226 ; sentiment of nature, 240 ; 
drama, 55, 251 

Individualism, in modern “lyric,” 
40 ; in growth of prose, 51 ; ap- 
parently prominent in early 
poetry, 62, 63, 347 sqq. ; Chris- 
tian, 66 ; in criticism, 68 ; de- 
velopment of, 72, 81, 86, 182, 
185 sqq., 192, 203 sqq., 215 sqq., 
219 sqq., 230, 244 sqq., 256, 354 
sqq. ; in Homeric poems, 99 ; 
historical development of in- 
verted, 154, 155 ; affecting ideas 
of Nature, 165 sqq. ; in Hades, 
187 sqq. ; extreme, effect of, on 
drama, 213,362, 370 ; in Athens, 
England, Spain, compared, 218, 
249, 250; Greek, incapable of 
being hastily Romanised, 223 ; 
in satire, 262 ; in Imperial Rome, 
264 sqq.‘, and self-culture, 268; 
Hebrew, 273, 277, 285; Indian, 
303, 307 ; in East and West, con- 
trasted, 328, 335; growth of 
modern European, 349 sqq., 361 ; 
in Shaksperian drama, 364 ; nar- 
rowed artificially, 366, 367, 386 ; 
united with social spirit, 370 sqq. ; 
feudal, 376 ; democratic, 3S6, 389 
Inherited guilt, in Athenian drama, 
61 ; how treated by Greek and 
Hebrew individualism, 64, 282 ; 
derived from clan life, 96, 184; 
in modern Europe, 360 
Ionian festivals, 180 
Isajus, 248 

Isokratcs, 38, 172, 245 
Italian, influences on English 
literature, 79 ; drama, 362 sqq. 
Izar , 135 

J 

Japanese lyric drama, 199 sqq., 325 
sqq., 224 
Jdtra, 311, 312 
Jebb, 13, 49 


Jeremiah, 275, 303 

Jerusalem, 285 

Job, book of, 149 

Jodelle, 364, 365 

Johnson, 43, 323, 367 

Jones, Sir William, 76 

Josephus, 283, 284 

Julien, M. Stanislas, 321 note , 325 

Juvenal, 25 

K 

Kalidasa, 313, 318 
Kantemir, 84 
Kasida, 46 

Khalaf-el-Ahmar, 134 
Khomse, 137 
Khorovod, 103, 203 
Kingsley, 21, 22 
Klopstock, 386 
Ivorner, 40 
Kosegarten, 133 

L 

La Bruyere, 250 
Lamb, Charles, 3 
Lamentations, Book of, 275 note. 
Language, and translation, 48 ; de 
terioration of Hebrew, 236 ; 
Latin, nature of, 267 ; of Indian 
and Chinese dramas, compared, 
334, 335 

Laprade, Victor de, 19, 162, 240, 
382, 383 

Latifundia, 257, 258 
Laveleye, 62, 95 
Lebid, 147, 167 
Legge, Dr., 122, 295, 296 
Lermontoff, 327 
Lessing, 276, 368, 369 
Library, Alexandrian, 253 
Linus Hymn, 105, 106 
Literary tricks, Athenian and 
Chinese, 254 ; Hebrew, 275 
Literate class, rise of Hebrew, 274 
Literatura, 5 

Literature, indefinite meaning of, 
causes of, 17 ; provisional defini- 
tion of, 19; science of, 20; con- 
trasted with specialised know- 
ledge, 77, 78; Hebrew and Greek 


398 


INDEX. 


contrasted, 98 ; differentiation in 
development of, 127, 128 ; popular, 
want of at Rome, 193 sqq. ; in 
India, 302 ; attempt to sever, 
from practical life, 250 ; national, 
399 sqq. ; problems of, 316 
Lityerses , 106 
Livius Andronicus, 222 
Livy, 196 
Locke, 75 
Lomonossotf, 84 

London, influence of, on English 
literature, 345, 367 
Longfellow, 49 note 
Lowth, 45 
Lucan, 265, 267 
Lucretius, 239, 383 
Lusiad , 383 note 
Luther, 39, 359 
Lyall, 134, 140, 147, 150 
Lycidas , 260, 384 

“ Lyric,” definition of, 38 ; varie- 
ties of, 39, 40 ; Dorian and Mo- 
lian, 101 ; personal and imper- 
sonal, 104, 105 ; Hugo on, 153 ; 
of early contrasted with modern 
life, 155 ; under the tyrants, 182, 
183; lyric poetry and Nature, 
255 

M 

Macaulay, 26, 42, 89, 93, 195, 242, 
344, 366 
Magdani, 237 

Mahabharata, 159, 305 sqq., 316 
Mahaffy, Professor, on status of 
Greek women, 25, 248, 249 ; on 
culture-influence of the tyrants, 
182 ; on the chorus of iEschylus, 
207 

Maine, Sir Henry, 62, 72, 95, 100, 
120, 129, 132, 340 
Malachi, 277, 278 
Mdlcdi and Mddhava , 16, 226 
Manu, code, 245 
Marlow, 356 
Martial, 266 
Marzuki, 133 
Mashal , 142 

Masks, Athenian and Japanese 
dramatic, 201, 202 


Menander, 203, 214, 231, 250 sqq. ; 
philosophy of, 251 ; sentiment of 
Nature in, 252, 255 
Menshim, 141 

Metres, development of, 46; in- 
fluences of language-structure 
on, 48 ; Arab, 134 
Microcosmography, 250 note. 
Mictlan, 145 

Miletus, development of literature 
in, 183, 194 

Milton, 218, 246, 324, 325,364 note, 
3S4, 385 
Mimes, 221, 222 
Mimnermus, 182, 256 
Mir, 103, 122, 283 
Miracle-plays and mysteries, 34, 58, 
61, 351 sqq., 356, 364, 388; 
contrasted and compared with 
Faust, 370, 372 

Mo'allaqah, of Zulieyr, 140; of 
Lebid, 147, 167 
Modernised poetry, 47 
Moliere, his characters, 26, 366; 194 
247, 250 

Mommsen, 193, 262 
Monks and literature, 34S, 376 
Montesquieu, 70, 156-158, 162, 345 
Morrison, 16 

Moschus, 118 note, 239, 256, 324 
Muller, K. O., 6, 9, 103, 104, 106, 

109, 112, 122, 123, 181, 202, 204, 
207, 213, 216, 246 

Muller, Max, 114, 290 

Music and early literature, 105, 

110 , 112 

Myths, 166 sqq. ; Roman, 195, 239 ; 

Greek, 238, 239 
Ndbis, 112, 125, 126, 275, 277 
Nmvius, 223 
Nasse, 62 

National literature, 80, 81, 339 sqq. 
Nature, how treated in Athens and 
Rome, 54 ; Indian reverence for, 
55, 290, 308, 309, 313 sqq. ; in 
clan poetry, 163, sqq. ; individual- 
ised, 165; in world-literature 
238 sqq. ; socialised or individual 
ised, 240; sentiment of, in Ho- 
meric poems, 255 ; sentiment of, 
and social life, 53 sag., 257, 267 
336, 380 ; humanised, 260 sqq . ; 


INDEX. 


399 


in Chinese plays, 320 sqq . ; in 
Faust contrasted with Mystery- 
plays, 372, 373 ; Christianity and, 
375 ; feudalised, 377 ; Hellen- 
ised, 381 sqq. ; Milton’s treat- 
ment of, 384, 385 ; sentiment of, 
in Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, 
compared, 387, 388 
Nehemiali, 2S2 
Nibelungenlied, 317, 374 
Niebuhr, 195 
Nirvana, 301 


O 

Odyssey, Hades of, G3, 187; 123, 
222, 255 

Otficia and early drama, 351 
Omar, Khalif, 173 
Orestes, 31 

Osann, Professor, 253 
Overburv, 250 
Ovid, 261, 267 


P 

Pacuvius, 231 
Painting, Roman, 267 note 
Pal grave, 14, 38 
Paradise Lost, 42, 43 
Parallelism, Arabic, Chinese, He- 
brew, 45, 51 
Parasite, Indian, 316 
Paris, influence of, on French litera- 
ture, 345, 365, 366, 369 
Parthenia, 103 
Passion-plays, Persian, 31 
Pastoral, poetry, its Sicilian home, 
257, 258 ; elegy, 324, 384, 385 ; 
drama, 363 

P atria pot estas, 129, 173, 197 
“ People, the,” rise of, 67 
Percy, Reliques , 97, 161 note 
Periclean Age, unhistorically 
treated, 171 

Personal poetry, 130, 158, 159 
Personality, objective in clan age, 
152 ; various types of, 156, 375; 
how these affect aspects of Nature, 
165, 373 

Peruvian dances, 118 


Pessimism, Hebrew, 282, 284 
Petrarch, 380, 381 
Phe recycles, 180 
Philemon, 214 
Phrvnichus, 201 

Pindar, 14, 40, 107, 110, 112, 122, 
187 sqq., 258; contrasted with 
Ezekiel, 271, 272 
Pi-pa-ki, 319, 321 note, 331 
Plato, 14, 37, 59, 122, 186. 191, 244 
sqq., 252, 279, 280, 281 note , 387 
Platonius, 215 

Plautus, 26 ; Psenulus of, 33, 226 ; 
his drama and social life at Rome, 
196, 227; 221, 224; metre of, 
225 ; names of his characters, 229 
note ; his Captivi , 249 
Plinv, 266 
Plutarch, 105, 106 
Poetry, didactic, 19 
Pope, 79, 323, 367 ; his treatment 
of Nature, 385 
Prakrit, 301, 334 
Premare, 75 
Prometheus, 209 note 
Propertius, 261 
“ Prophets, sons of the,” 112 
Prose, development of, 46, 51, 82, 
128, 183, 195, 237, 244, 246, 252, 
264, 266, 300 ; checked in Iudia, 
299, 301; Aristotelized, 51; rhyth- 
mical, 52 note, 181 note 
Ptolemy Soter, 253 
Puranas, 299 
Pyrrhic, 119, 122 


Q 

Quinet, Edgar, 372 
Quintilian, 252, 262 
Qoheleth, 272 sqq . ; 279, 284, 303 
Qur’an, 8, 29, 128, 137, 238, 275 


R 

Rabelais, 355 
Racine, uses chorus, 218 
Ragnar Lodbrok, 143 sqq, 
Ralston, 103 
Ramayana, 159, 305 sqq. 


400 


INDEX. 


Ramsay, Allan, 386 
Rasa, 311, 312 
Rawy, 128 
Ray mi, 118, 125 

Realism, medieval, 59, 350 ; dra- 
matic, meaning of, 357 
Recitation in early literature, 181, 
305 

Reformation, 75 
Renaissance, 74, 382 
Renan, 1G1 note, 194 
Reuchlin, 76 
Reville, Professor, 117 
Rig- Veda, 39, 113, 289, 304 
Roman, women, 25 ; poetry of 
Nature, 54 ; want of “ epic ” in- 
spiration, 159 ; literature, in- 
debtedness of, to Alexandrian, 
261 

“Romantic” school, 11, 35 
Rothschild, Baron, 353 
Rousseau, 153, 154, 367, 3C9 
Rucellai, 362 
Rumelin, 364 

Ruskin, 46, 52 note, 229 note, 2G7 
note 

Russia, imitation literature of, 83, 
84 ; choral songs of, 103 


S 

Sachs, Hans, 355, 358 sqq., 368, 
369 

Saint Lambert, 386 
Saint-Pierre, 377, 381 
Saint Simon, 265 
Sallust, 265 

Samson Agonistes, 218, 384 
Sanskrit, 76, 237, 299, 310, 811 
Sappho, 101, 104 

Satire, 262, 367, 390 ; Chinese dra- 
matic, 324 note 

Saturnian metre, 194, 222, 223, 
225 

Savigny, 132 

Saxon poetry and blood -revenge, 97 
Scandinavian paradise, 145 
Sceplirus, 106 
Schiller, 54, 327, 369 
Schlegel, A. W., 11, 34, 43, 92, 342, 
343, 366 


Schoolcraft, 102, 106, 119 
Schopenhauer, 256 
Schultens, 135 
Science and literature, 252 
Scdp, 39, 163 

Scott, Sir Walter, 57, 60, 136 
j Seneca, 362, 365 
Serapeum, 253 

Shakspere, his characters, 26, 229 
note ; his conceits and puns, 28 ; 
his “ histories,” 30; survivals from 
ruder drama in, 124, 221, 363 ; 
foreign associations on his stage, 
33; his treatment of “the people,” 
69 ; 315, 327, 330, 333, 356, 373, 
382 

Slieol, 63, 145, 188, 271 
Shelley, on translation, 47 ; on 
imagination and sympathy, 243 ; 
266, 309, 327, 365, 366, 372, 
387 

Sink King, 12, 39, 114, 159, 294 
sqq. 

Sidney, 364 
Simcox, 222 
Simmias, 254 

Simonides of Amorgos, 24, 181 
Simonides of Kcos, 107, 111, 273, 
274 

Singing personage in Chinese plays, 
199, 319, 320 
Sismondi, 4 
Slane, Baron de, 29 
Slaves, in Hades, 192 ; influence of 
Attic, 248 ; as affecting the sen- 
timent of Nature, 257, 258; at 
Rome, 263 
Smith, Adam, 149 
Social, studies, peculiar difficulties 
of, 92; spirit, 368, 372 
Socrates, 37, 186, 216, 217, 279 
Solon, 181, 182, 192, 194 
Sophists, 37, 186, 217, 245 
Sophocles, 10, 60, 184, 198, 207 
258, 326, 327, 364, 365. 
Soumarokoff, 84 
Sounds and ideas, 44 
Spain, influence of, on England, 
79 

Speech, public, illustrating growth 
of Greek literature, 77 
Spenser, 15, 78, 86, 109 


INDEX 


401 


Stage, Japanese, 200; Athenian, 
205 

Stanley, Dean, 275, 278 
Stoicism, 268 
Style, true nature of, 367 
Suetonius, 265 
Suidas, 237 
Suktas, 113 
Sutras, 113, 298 
Swift, 263, 386 
Swinburne, 111, 219 note 
Symonds, J. A., 8, 179 
Syrinx , the, 254, 276 


T 


Tacitus, 264 sqq., 274 
Talmud, 271 
Targums, 236 
Tasso, 363 
Tazya , 312 
Tekya, 31 
Ten Brink, 8 
Ten Broeck, 119 
Terence, 196, 221, 224, 227, 230 
Terpander, 111 
Teuffel, 219, 222, 237 
Thar, 63, 137, 184 
Theocritus, 55, 165, 239, 254, 255 
sqq., 258 sqq., 261, 324, 3 63, 385 
Theognis, 177 
Theophrastus, 249 
Thespis, 203 
Thomson, 386 
Threnos, 109, 110 
Thucydides, 172, 266 
Tliymele, 205 
Tibullus, 115 
Tobit, 278 
Tocqueville, 343 
Toutain, 365 

Towns, modern European, rise of, 
67, 68, 341, 348 sqq., 380 ; drama 
in, 81, 198, 353, 359 ; Arab, and 
culture, 148, 150 
Tragedy, Attic, decline of, 213 
Translation, 44 
Trissino, 362 
Tylor, 36 


Tyndall, 77 

Tyrrell, Professor, on the prologues 
of Plautus, 225 
Tyrtseus, 110 


U 

Umm Aufa, 140 

“Unities,” the, 35, 37, 205, 313, 
329 sqq., 363 
Upanishads, 298 


Y 

Yalmiki, 305 

Veda, 113, 114, 288, 293, 298 
Vega, Lope de, 313 
Vergil, 54, 239, 260, 261, 264, 267, 
272, 333 

Verse, prevalence of, in early litera- 
ture explained, 160 
Vicarious punishment, origin of, 96 
Vidushaka, 219, 316, 334 
Village communities, 55, 62, 103, 
172, 202, 203, 270, 277, 283, 335, 
348 

Villeinage, 378 
Vita, 316 

Voltaire, 43, 75, 80, 93, 220, 344, 
386 

Von Maurer, 62 


W 

Weber, 300, 301 
Wehrgeld, 143, 184, 1SS 
Whitman, 32, 69, 71, 364, 372, 388, 
389 

Williams, Monier, 290, 304, 305 
Wilson, II. II., 114, 310, 311, 314, 

334 

Wisdom, Book of, 280 sqq., 2S4 
Women, 25, 32, 193, 248 
Wordsworth, J., 117 
Wordsworth, W., 49, 165, 382, 3S7, 
388 


402 


INDEX. 


World-literature, marks of, 23G ; 
place of, in literary evolution, 240, 
241 ; 288, 342 

Writing, influence of, on literature, 
128, 161 


X 

Xenophon, 186 
Xu thus, 180 


Y 

Yahvism, 112. 126, 238, 278, 288 
Youen anthology of plays, 319, 
321 


Z 

Zechariah, 278 
Zenodotus, 2.14 
Zuheyr, 140 


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the structure and operations of the brain. We have been fascinated by this vol- 
ume more than by any other treatise we have yet seen on the machinery of sen- 
sibility and thought ; and we have been instructed not only by much that is new, 
but by many sagacious practical hints such as it is well for everybody to under- 
stand.” — The Popular Science Monthly. 

THE CONCEPTS AND THEORIES OF MODERN PHYSICS. Ey 

J. B. Stai.lo. 12mo. Cloth, $1.75. 

“Judge Stallo’s work is an inquiry into the validity of those mechanical con- 
ceptions of the universe which are now held as fundamental in physical science. 
He takes up the leading modern doctrines which are based upon this mechanical 
conception, such as the atomic constitution of matter, the kinetic theory of gases, 
the conservation of energy, the nebular hypothesis, and other views, to find how 
much stands upon solid empirical ground, and how much rests upon metaphys- 
ical speculation. Since the appearance of Dr. Draper’s ‘Religion and Science,’ 
no book has been published in the country calculated to make so deep an impres- 
sion on thoughtful and educated readers as this volume. . . . The range and 
minuteness of the author’s learning, the acuteness of his reasoning, and the 
singular precision and clearness of his style, are qualities which very seldom 
have been jointly exhibited in a scientific treatise.”— New York Sun. 

THE FORMATION OF VEGETABLE MOULD, THROUGH THI 
ACTION OF WORMS, WITH OBSERVATIONS ON THEIR 
HABITS. By Charles Darwin, LL. D., F.R. S., author of “On the 
Origin of Species,” etc., etc. With Illustrations. 12mo, cloth. Price, $1.50. 

“ Mr. Darwin’s little volume on the habits and instincts of earth-worms is no 
les3 marked than the earlier or more elaborate efforts of his genius by freshness 
of observation, unfailing power of interpreting and correlating facts, and logical 
vigor in generalizing upon them. The main purpose of the work is to point out 
the share which worms have taken in the formation of the layer of vegetable 
mould which covers the whole surface of the land in every moderately humid 
country. All lovers of nature will unite in thanking Mr. Darwin for the new and 
interesting light he has thrown upon a subject so long overlooked, yet so full of 
interest and instruction, as the structure and the labors of the earth-worm.” — 
Saturday Review. 

“ Respecting worms as among the most useful portions of animate nature, 
Dr. Darwin relates, in this remarkable book, their structure and habits, the part 
they have played in the burial of ancient buildings and the denudation of the 
land, in the disintegration of rocks, the preparation of soil for the growth ol 
plants, and in the natural history of the world.” — Boston Advertiser. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, . 

1. 3, & 5 Bond Street. New York. 






















